On a mission the Cook Islands Statistics office hosted two International Money Fund (IMF) / Pacific Technical Assistance Center (PFTAC) consultants Bimlesh Krishna and Richard Wild for an intense two-week operation. The goal was to review and improve how the Cook Islands’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) statistical series is currently compiled, approached and produced. Over the course of the project, both senior statisticians from the Cook Islands and the Technical Assistants meticulously combed through every last detail of the GDP worksheets and data to ensure things were either up to date or upgraded to international standards.

The new national accounts compiler reports “The last in person visit for GDP was sometime in 2020, since then till today there were some issues with our GDP, a lot of our deflators needed some updating.”

“The deflators were significantly improved and as a result our constant prices have improved drastically.”

The mission served to also provide an in depth training for the new national accounts complier. With succession planning being a major priority for the Statistics Office, the intense training provided by the IMF/PFTAC consultants during the mission, alongside the handover from the senior national accounts compiler and the tutorage from the chief statistician were beneficial first steps towards this goal.

The new national accounts compiler comments “”The mission made significant improvements to our GDP estimates. There were new techniques introduced to clean data. This in turn made it easier to adjust and map all records to the correct industrial classifications. The team worked diligently and I consider the mission to be 100% a success.”

“I think it is important for external expertise to come in and look at our GDP, they can see whether what we’re doing is in accordance to sna08 or not. We could always lean on their years of experience and wealth of knowledge, to provide us with some guidance.”

With the now updated national accounts Cook Islands Stats looks to continue the momentum from the mission with the new national accounts compiler eager to maintain the high quality and standards of how we collect, compile and report national accounts.

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