Central Bureau of Statistics switches the reference year to 2010/11 from 2000/01 to estimate macroeconomic data
KATHMANDU, March 4: Nepal’s economy shrank by 4.6 percent in the first three months of the current fiscal year after the impacts of the coronavirus hit the country’s economic activities.
The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) unveiled the data on Thursday. According to the CBS, Nepal’s economic growth in the last fiscal year also went down by 1.99 percent. This contradicts with the statistics of the Ministry of Finance that had claimed the economic growth rate of the country at 0.02 percent in 2019/20.
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The economic activities were largely hit after the government enforced a countrywide lockdown on March 24 last year. Due to the reason, the country’s economic growth went down by 15.4 percent during the last three months of mid-May and mid-July in the last fiscal year compared to the same period in 2018/19, shows the CBS data.
According to the CBS, Nepal’s gross domestic product (GDP) has reached Rs 3.94 trillion. The GDP size has been estimated in the revised reference year. The CBS has switched the base year to 2010/11 from the previous 2000/01 to calculate the new macroeconomic figures.
With the revision in rebasing, the CBS shows that the contribution of the service sector to the GDP has grown by 8.4 percent while those of primary and secondary sectors declined by 9.4 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively.
In the new dimension, the CBS has revised the weightage of service sector in GDP estimation from 48 percent to 52.2 percent. Similarly, the weightage of primary sector in the new reference year has been taken at 34 percent from 37.6 percent and that of manufacturing sector has been reduced to 13.9 percent from 14.4 percent.
Based on the new reference year, the country’s average income stands at US $ 1,134 per capita per year.
