Reassessing GDP in the Americas in

Reassessing GDP in the Americas in relation to base years: In this section we
report on an exercise to estimate what the size of Latin American GDP might be
if most countries updated their base years to 2013. When this exercise was carried
out for Africa it was estimated that GDP might be currently underestimated by
between 20% and 55%. Given the inadequate resources allocated to national
income accounting in most African countries a rebasing exercise, often carried
out with external technical and financial support, usually does far more than the
updating relative price weights. Some sectors of the economy are measured more
accurately using better survey methods, while some economic activities are
monitored that were not previously monitored such as mobile telephony. This
explains the 60% uplift experienced by Ghana.