Fun With Numbers

From yesterday's City AM:

THE NIGERIAN economy is nearly twice as large as official estimates previously suggested, making it Africa's biggest, after a recalculation by the country's statistical agency.

The exercise has pushed the west African nation’s calculation of nominal GDP in 2013 to 80.2 trillion Nigerian naira (£295bn), far higher than the previous estimate of 42.4 trillion naira.

This new method, announced yesterday, means the country of 170m people is Africa’s largest economy, outstripping South Africa by £60bn, and is the 26th biggest in the world.

From today's City AM:

We are about to see a beautiful demonstration of this with the British economy, where the official statisticians will shortly entirely and drastically rewrite decades of history...

One change will see research and development spending classified as capital expenditure; at a stroke, this will raise the level of the UK's economic output by a cool £25bn.

That’s just the beginning: overall, the statistical deckchair shuffling will boost the size of the UK economy by between 2.5 and five per cent, a shockingly large amount (and a vast range that makes it hard for outside forecasters to be able to predict exactly what the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will come up with).