Revisions of GDP: Data and Assessment of Statistical Properties

Monitoring the current situation and forecasting ways of developing economic activity based on official statistical estimates of the various indicators’ values is critical for making timely economic and political decisions and business planning. In this regard, revaluation of data and forecasts based on earlier or later estimates can potentially lead to completely different economic and political decisions. At least five planned or regular revaluations of the gross domestic product indicator are published according to the official Rosstat methodology. Apart from planned revaluations, Rosstat conducts unscheduled recalculations of GDP, associated, for example, with changes in the classifiers of economic activities or with the agricultural census. According to authors’ own methodology, this work reflects data collected on planned and unplanned revaluations of the nominal volume of GDP (in billion rubles) and the index of the physical value of GDP from Q1 1994 to Q1 2020, published monthly in the summary «Short-term economic indicators of the Russian Federation»; vintages of these indicators were shaped both in annual and quarterly terms; Russian specific terms being therefore not well-established in the domestic literature were optionally proposed; results of the analysis of the revisions’ statistical property of the indicators of the gross domestic product of the Russian Federation, both in annual and quarterly frequency were presented. In particular, the analysis was made with regard to systematic biases in the revaluation of indicators of the standardized value of gross domestic product and the index of the physical quantity of GDP, changes in their dynamic properties, average characteristics of revisions, the presence (or absence) of noise and news components in both indicators.