Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb was worth at the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, at a meeting on Tuesday, for not providing accurate statistics, which led the rest of the government to plan on the basis of incorrect figures. The complaint is that the PBS gives information based on old surveys, thus failing to provide an accurate picture of the economy. The Finance Minister, himself with an extensive background in banking, would only too aware of the need for accurate and up-to-date information. PBS is part of the Planning Ministry, but it is supposed to feed all government ministries the information they require. If it gets the figures wrong, all ministries will get their planning wrong, but the ministry which suffers the most is the Finance Ministry. It needs the PBS to get things right for it to calculate future resource demands. It has its own statistical mechanism in the form of the office of the Economic Adviser, which partially duplicates the work of the PBS, by presenting its own analysis.
Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of statistics knows, raw data can be manipulated. Here we are not talking about massaging the figures to give the result wanted, though that has been known to happen. It has happened that figures that have been sent by the Economic Adviser to his political masters have been returned with the direction that ‘more acceptable’ figures be sent again. Here the desire is not so much to please one’s masters, as to avoid the appearance of incompetence. No one replies that he doesn’t have the figures because there hasn’t been a survey for a long time. One pulls the statistician’s favourite trick: one extrapolates. There are many ways of doing that, but all of them involve taking old figures, finding the historical rate of change, and then applying it to find out what the figure should be now.
The problem with that, as Mr Aurangzeb fears, the new figure, which may not be entirely accurate, then becomes the basis of future calculations. The people at PBS are not lazy, just strapped for both time and money. However, it should not be forgotten that the PBS supervises the Pakistan Census Organization, which handles the census, which has become controversial. It is controversial for precisely the reasons that Mr Aurangzeb wants reliable figures: so that financial allocations are made where needed. It therefore naked political and practical sense to make sure that the government’s figures are accurate.
