Minister of National Planning Commission, Dr Shamsuddeen Usman, has restated the Federal Government’s commitment to the growth and development of the Nigerian statistical system.

Usman said this at the stakeholders’ workshop on the “Rebasing of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)”, organised by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in Abuja. He said statistics was imperative as the full realisation of sectoral goal targets in the Transformation Agenda and Vision 20:2020 policy depended on the availability of timely and reliable statistics. According to him, the purpose of rebasing Nigeria’s GDP is to measure changes that occurred from 1990 to date.

“Nigeria’s GDP estimates are compiled, using the three approaches such as production, income and expenditure. Each of these approaches accounts for the nation’s output from different perspectives of economic activity. Several important indicators that can be derived from GDP estimates includes: per capital GDP, fiscal deficit to GDP ratio, debt-GDP ratio, tax-GDP ratio, oil and non-oil GDP and sectoral contribution to GDP,” Usman said.

He said the above indicators were aimed at capturing one aspect of the economy or the other to measure changes occurring over time. The minister said GDP determined a nation’s economic standing in the comity of nations to position it politically in terms of commanding international respect and attracting foreign investment.

Earlier, Dr. Yemi Kale, Statistician-General of the Federation, said Nigeria had not rebased its national account estimates which yielded the GDP in more than 23 years. He said this necessitated the rebasing of the country’s GDP by the NBS due to changes in the pattern and classification of sectors, subsectors and their regrouping.

According to him, the rebasing is due to the adoption of the latest System of National Accounts of the UN.