CBI Changes CPI Base Year

The base year for releasing Central Bank of Iran's official statistics will be shifted to the last Iranian year that ended on March 20, 2017, announced CBI's director general for economic statistics.

"Consumer Price Index will be calculated based on the fiscal 2016-17 as of July 23 this year," Alireza Moqtadaei was also quoted as saying by the official news website of CBI.

The base year for calculating GDP growth is currently the fiscal 2011-12 that had been earlier moved from 2004-05. However, due to the price index stability of previous year after a period of volatility and hyperinflation, CBI decided to upgrade its base year.      

During the previous fiscal year, a single-digit inflation rate was achieved after more than two and a half decades that remained below 10% for the remainder of the year.

Moqtadaei, who was one of the speakers at a CBI conference on economic statistics on Saturday, referred to measures undertaken by his department on new systems of collecting and processing data, noting that the central bank succeeded in expanding its system of releasing economic statistics.

“We conducted many studies in collaboration with the Informatics Services Company with the goal of undertaking an effective release of data using the capabilities of commercial intelligence,” he added.

The official also said an offline platform for job creation and unemployment has been finalized and instruments required to assess inflation have been “designed and implemented” on the website of the central bank.

Noting that the CBI generates Producer Price Index in three categories of industries, services and agriculture, the official said that in the studies conducted for changing the base year to the previous fiscal year, “it was decreed that the construction and intermediary sectors will also be added to PPI”.

Moqtadaei predicted that these additions will be implemented in the statistics of the next fiscal year that begins in March 2018.

  Official Source of Data

As outlined by CBI’s deputy for economic affairs who was the other major speaker at the event, the central bank has been given a new legal mandate that makes it the source of official data.

This new development would give the CBI the upper hand against Iran Statistical Center–another entity in charge of publishing data.

Peyman Qorbani also said that fortunately, the central bank has been given a new legal mandate in the production and release of its statistics from today, based on which statistics provided by the central bank are regarded as the official technical data of the country.

This is significant for the central bank and many official bodies, businesses and pundits in light of the fact that a notable discrepancy has often been evident between statistics released by CBI and SCI on a variety of subjects, including GDP and inflation.

According to Qorbani, CBI received its newfound authority in releasing statistics as a result of a series of regulations presented by the government of President Hassan Rouhani to the parliament during the final months of the previous fiscal year, which were approved by lawmakers.