Things They Don’t Tell You About GDP
11th February 2013
Since some data is simply not available, BEA has to make assumptions about the direction of the changes that they cannot record. For example, for the first quarter of 2011, the BEA assumed that nondurable manufacturing inventories increased, exports increased, and imports increased. When you read that exports increased this year, that is because the BEA assumed it increased – they did not actually have any data to measure it when they released the new GDP numbers.