New Census Act to improve efficiency

Business Reporter
ENACTMENT of the new Census and Statistics Act is expected to improve efficiency in the production and distribution of statistics, the Zimbabwe National Statisti-cal Agency has said.
Zimstats board chairman Mr Douglas Hoto said the new law would ensure that operations of the National Statistics System would be streamlined.
“For the past few years the National Statistical System has been experiencing problems and produced conflicting statistics.
“This was mainly due to weak co-ordination of the National Statistical System.
“The enactment of the new Census and Statistics Act is expected to rectify this problem with Zimstats being the co-ordinator of the NSS,” he said.
He added: “The advantage of having a well co-ordinated NSS is that it minimises duplication of efforts and reduces waste of resources.
“It is, therefore, crucial to have a well coordinated NSS with nationally and internationally agreed methodologies,” he said.
Experts believe that an efficient national statistics system is critical for the designing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of national policies.
Despite, these contentions by the Zimstats chairman, Zimbabwe still faces challenges in respect to economic statistics as an earlier revamping of the country’s statistical body is yet to reflect improved capacities.
For instance, there has been a noted delay in the promulgation of important statistics such as the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
A number of critical national statistics from last year are currently unavailable, for instance, Zimstats released the country’s GDP estimates for 2009 last month.
According to these figures the country’s GDP in 2009 was estimated to be just over US$5 billion.
There have also been accusations that the statistical’s body methodologies to estimate GDP have been undermining the size of the Zimbabwean economy.
In the 2009 December budget, the Government revised up the size of the economy from US$3.5 billion to US$5.1 billion but with barely a corresponding uplift in the growth rate
Last year during the presentation of the 2011 National Budget, Finance Minister Tendai Biti announced a re-rating of the economy of up to US$8 billion, which some analysts contend, is still too low.