Time for a quick poll. The ABS figures today claims that Australia had positive growth over the previous quarter – but revised downwards estimates for growth in the two quarters before that.
This vote, then is simple – do you think that next quarter the ABS will revise downwards its estimate for growth this quarter and, if so, will that be enough of a downward revision to mean that we had a technical recession?
1 comment
8 June, 2009 at 15:02
Rationalist
According to the ABS:
“There are quarterly revisions due to the incorporation of more up-to-date source data and changes to seasonal adjustment factors. The overall effect of these revisions has been to decrease growth in the seasonally adjusted volume measure of GDP in December quarter 2008 by 0.1 percentage points, and to increase September quarter 2008 growth by 0.1 percentage points.”
So both quarters were NOT revised downward, only the December quarter was revised downward while the November quarter went up.
Nevertheless, I am not ruling out future wiggling of figures by the ABS, although a downward revision of more than 0.4% is quite a bit of a wiggle indeed.