LUSAKA, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- Zambia intends to revise and benchmark its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to update the country's economic data, according to the country's national statistical office on Monday.
"We are planning to rebase and benchmark our GDP for 2017. We wanted to do it in 2016, but because of the bad economic situation we had to postpone our plans, but we will do it now," said Goodson Sinyenga, Zambia's Central Statistical Office (CSO) assistant director in charge of economics and financial statistics.
The idea was to make planning and investment decisions more robust and informed through the collection of highly segregated data, Sinyenga said during a press briefing, adding that the GDP was last rebased in 2010.
The statistics agency has since come up with a model in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund and the International Labor Organization.
The model will provide a detailed picture about the structure of the economy and the relationship between products and industries in a given year by providing elements of the production process, the use of the goods and services and the income generated.
Zambia's GDP was 216.1 billion Zambian Kwacha (about 21.8 billion U.S. dollars) last year.
