IN RECENT days queries have again been raised about the accuracy of official data. Considering the vital importance of Government statistics for planning in both the public and private sectors, these concerns cannot be treated lightly. No less a person than Dennis Morrison, the chairman of the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) and a key economic adviser to the Government, has publicly raised questions about the accuracy of economic data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).
Mr. Morrison's specific issue with the PIOJ is the growth figure. The Planning Institute has been offering a GDP growth figure of 3 per cent which Mr. Morrison believes to be higher, based on the consumption of raw materials such as cement and oil which can be easily tracked in official data collection. "We need to do something to upgrade the collection of data so that we have more realistic information coming out," he said.
Another twist to the disagreement by two very senior public servants, which must not be overlooked, is the role of the PIOJ. The public is never quite certain if the basic function of the Planning Institute is to provide as much good news as possible about the performance of the Government as master (a position towards which a Dennis Morrison is likely to lean) or to provide bald, objective data to the public as master (a position the PIOJ's Wesley Hughes might find desirable but difficult to maintain).
Only a few weeks earlier, Montego Bay businessman and chairman of the St. James Development Committee, Mark Kerr-Jarrett, had raised concerns about the accuracy of census data, at least for Montego Bay. The 2001 census, conducted by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN), reported a population of 100,000 for Montego Bay. But Mr. Kerr-Jarrett, with firsthand knowledge of the Second City, estimates that some 95,000 people reside in the 19 informal settlements in and around the city who with the 60,000 or so in formal communities would take the area population closer to 200,000. Obtaining data of any sort out of squatter communities is notoriously difficult as the process is frustrated by high levels of suspicion compounded by inaccessibility.
STATIN's defence of its methodology in response to Mr. Kerr-Jarrett has not, in our view, adequately addressed the issue of accuracy. And as Mr. Kerr-Jarrett has pointed out, if our census data is inaccurate, all of our projections and plans are going to be off mark.
Much of the so-called informal economy already falls outside the measuring net of the agencies of Government. Estimates range as high as 50 per cent of the true economy being in this unmeasured informal sector.
The official collection and delivery of accurate economic and social data, of course, presumes an organised society with formal communities and mostly a formal economy, and a government committed to the process. The extent to which Jamaica does not match these criteria will leave our official data in suspicion.
To reduce the doubts about the accuracy of the official reports STATIN must find new and more creative means of bringing into the official count, those informal and less structured sectors of the economy that often escape adequate scrutiny.
