Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A step in the right direction for GDP reporting

To my surprise, TURSTAT started releasing working day and seasonally adjusted GDP, going back to 1998. I know I have quite a few readers interested in growth, so I am happy to provide qoq growth numbers.

The wd and sa numbers are from TURKSTAT, whereas the trend numbers come from my friends at Turkey Data Monitor, who just apply a Hodrick-Prescott filter on the working-day and seasonally-adjusted series. You might also be wondering if the wd adjustment makes a big difference, so here are the yoy figures for the regular and wd series:

As you can see, there are only three quarters where there is a significant difference between the two series. That's why economists usually account for wd in Industrial Production, but not in GDP.

Thanks to TURKSTAT for this nice surprise, but it'd be better if such surprises were announced beforehand. Now, let's hope that they will release the GDP figures in a more timely manner.

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