Quarterly provincial GDP estimates are not published in South Africa, but are available from private sector providers. In today’s post by Oliver Guest, we compare historical annual GDP growth rates for the Western Cape against implied figures from quarterly estimates from private sector providers for which these estimates can be obtained from public domain reports.
We take care to present the figures in a comparable form and show that there are meaningful differences in the private sector estimates published each year and subsequently published official statistics. Private sector providers will revise their historical estimates after official statistics are released, so these differences disappear if one compares historical ex-post (current vintage) estimates. This is why policy analysis must incorporate real-time estimates.
Private providers’ estimates have implied cumulative 16.5% real GDP growth (1.4% average per year) in the Western Cape since 2014, compared to official estimates of 10.2% cumulative (0.9% average per year).
