I think Mark Carney was right when he questioned the abilities of the ONS and their ways and means of producing data and I hope he takes the government to task over it.

As someone who likes to delve down a bit deeper into the numbers these preliminary numbers are more or less a waste of space. Apart from giving us the headline numbers, which is fine, the rest of it is lacking the details as it only incorporates around 44% of the data.

“The preliminary estimate of GDP is produced using the output approach to measuring GDP and is published less than four weeks after the end of the quarter to which it relates. At this stage the data content of this estimate is around 44% of the total required for the final output based estimate. Data content is higher for the first two months of the quarter compared with the third month which takes account of early returns to the monthly business survey of 44,000 businesses (there is typically a response rate of between 30-50% at this point in time). The estimate is therefore subject to revisions as more data become available, but between the preliminary and third estimates of GDP, revisions are typically small (around 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points), with the frequency of upward and downward revisions broadly equal.”

Now that’s all well and good as the revisions give us the full details on such unimportant things like export and import data, business investment, household expenditure, government expenditure, you know little things like that.

So all will be revealed at the next revision in August won’t it?

Oh no it bloody won’t!

“To allow sufficient time to prepare for the major changes in Blue Book 2014, ONS has decided to change the approach to the publication of the Second Estimate of GDP for Q2 2014. This estimate, due to be released on 15 August 2014, will be based entirely on output data. This will supplement the Preliminary Estimate of GDP for Q2 2014 released on 25 July 2014, by replacing the forecast data for the third month of the quarter for the Index of Production (IoP), the Index of Services (IoS) and the monthly construction output survey with actual data. There will be no published information on the income or expenditure components for Q2 2014 until the Quarterly National Accounts (QNA), which is due to be released on 30 September 2014. This will incorporate major changes to the National Accounts – more details are given in the article ‘Latest Developments to National Accounts’ published on the ONS website.”

In September the ONS are revising the way they calculate GDP and it’s going to be a big shake up, potentially adding 2-3% to GDP. In true British fashion I’m expecting a complete balls up but hey, at least the pimps and drug barons will have some concrete figures to give to their accountants for their tax returns

;-)

I Think I’ll book that day off

:-D