Briefing: For richer, for poorer: GDP revisions and Africa's statistical tragedy

ON 5N OVEMBER 2010, GHANA STATISTICAL SERVICES announced that it was revising the GDP estimates upwards by over 60 percent, suggesting that in previous GDP estimates economic activities worth about US$13 billion had been missed. After the revision a range of new activities were accounted for, and as a result Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a lowincome country to a lower-middle-income country. In the fall of 2011 Nigeria also announced a forthcoming upward revision of its GDP. Without presenting the public with any facts or figures, nor a date for the revision, it was announced by the director of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics that Nigeria soon would join Ghana in escaping poverty according to official statistics. This briefing first traces how the development community reacted to the news of the upward revision, before clarifying why Ghana became a lower-middle-income country overnight. It is very tempting to assume that this process was the result of tampering with numbers to gain political advantage, but I show that the upward revision did have a factual grounding and that it was done according to the book. The acknowledgement that the revision was undertaken according to the rules is actually more startling than if this was just sheer political manipulation of numbers, as it highlights the discrepancy between economic realities and the statistical metrics used to express and analyse wealth and poverty. The consequences for the comparisons of development across time and space in sub-Saharan Africa are mind-boggling, and the briefing considers the implications and likelihood of such revisions beyond Nigeria and Ghana. Finally, the briefing reassesses the production of development statistics in sub-Saharan Africa in the light of these game-changing revisions.