Introduction
Presently Guyana’s national accounts are compiled relative to the base year 2006. This replaced the previous 1988 base year series. Such rebasing is done periodically, and in 2006, the 1988 base year then in force was already 18 years old. This lapse in time made it plausible to assume that significant structural changes had occurred in the structure of production, consumption, and prices.
The process of rebasing/revising Guyana’s national accounts is somewhat technical, and therefore beyond the aim of this column. Put simply though, (as the Bureau of Statistics (BoS) itself describes the process on its Website) a national accounts survey is first undertaken in order to develop a “supply and use table for benchmarking the GDP estimate to the chosen base year (2006)”. And from this basis, the price series is calculated.
Following the rebasing exercise, the BoS indicated that, in addition to the increases in the size of the national accounts values for base year 2006 as compared to base year 1988, which was reported last week, two other changes emerged from the results: 1) the new GDP series yielded higher historical growth rates, and 2) marked changes had