TIL Desk/National/New Delhi/ Former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian has deduced in a new research paper that India may not have been the world’s fastest growing economy between 2011-12 and 2016-17 as its GDP growth rate was overestimated, a claim the government quickly rubbished saying its estimates were based on accepted procedures and methodologies.
India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate between this period should be about 4.5 per cent instead of the official estimate of close to 7 per cent, Narendra Modi government’s former CEA said in the research paper, published by the Center for International Development at Harvard University. “India changed its data sources and methodology for estimating real GDP for the period since 2011-12. This paper shows that this change has led to a significant overestimation of growth,” he said.
“A variety of evidence suggests that the methodology changes introduced for the post-2011 GDP estimates led to an over-estimation of GDP growth.” Manufacturing is one such sector where the calculations have been largely mismeasured, wrote Subramanian, who quit as the chief economic adviser in August last year before his extended tenure was to end in May 2019.
