Chart of the week: Britain’s neolithic statistics
It’s no surprise official statistics are subject to substantial revisions many years after they were first published.
"In this era of Big Data, UK statistics-gathering is neolithic," writes Philip Aldrick in The Times. Data on inflation is "collected by researchers wandering around shops with a clipboard". Employment figures rely on household questionnaires.
So it's no surprise that official statistics are subject to substantial revisions many years after they were first published, as shown by this chart of the latest revisions to GDP growth rates.
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Marina has a PhD in globalisation and the media from the London School of Economics, where she worked as a teaching assistant on the MSc Global Media. In 2014 she was invited to be a visiting scholar at Columbia University's sociology department in New York.
She has written for the Economists’ Intelligent Life magazine, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany. She is trilingual and lives in London. She writes features and is the markets editor at MoneyWeek..
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