“According to the data by the National Statistics Office of Georgia, industry turnover in the business sector has decreased by 22%.”
Giorgi Kandelaki, Member of the Parliamentary Minority, stated at the plenary session on 14 June 2013: “Industry turnover in the business sector decreased by 22%.”
The MP based his statement on the data from the first quarter of 2013 released by the National Statistics Office of Georgia.
FactCheckwondered whether or not industry turnover in fact decreased and checked the accuracy of the statement with the data from the National Statistics Office of Georgia.
According to the datareleased by the National Statistics Office of Georgia, turnover in the Georgian business sector decreased by 22% and the volume of production made in Georgia decreased by 26%. However, that is the data we get if we compare the fourth quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013. The National Statistics Office does not have a methodology of seasonal adjustments. Accordingly, if the data is not seasonally adjusted, comparing any quarter to any other quarter (adjacent or non-adjacent ) is not possible and only comparing of parallel quarters of different years is feasible. Accordingly, in order to get an exact economic impact, data from the first quarter of 2013 should be compared to the data from the first quarter of 2012.
If we use the abovementioned method of comparing, the outcome will be the following: the total turnover in the first quarter of 2012 amounted to GEL 8149.6 million and the same indicator for the first quarter of 2013 was 8614.7 million GEL. It turns out that the production turnover did not decrease; on the contrary, it increased by GEL 465.1 million or by 5%.
Conclusion If we compare the industry turnover of 2012 to the same data from 2013 according to the methodology used by the National Statistics Office we can see that the industry turnover did not decrease. When MP Kandelaki was speaking about a decrease of a turnover by 22%, apparently he was comparing data of the first quarter of this year to data of the fourth quarter of the last year. That was incorrect since the National Statistics Office does not have a methodology of seasonal adjustments. Correspondingly, we rate the statement by MP Giorgi Kandelaki as MOSTLY FALSE.
