Why doesn’t WAG produce regular GVA figures?

There has been some really interesting debate and discussion over the state of the Welsh Economy over the past few weeks that I hope it continues.

However with all the talk of job creation, targeting sectors, scrapping business support and inward investment which is important, there is one part of the jigsaw still missing. To really transform the Welsh Economy the Government needs to know what is going on in every sector via up to date data for every month and quarter.

Sadly in the 11 years the Welsh Assembly Government has been around, it hasn’t seen the need to collect even the most basic information needed to measure the output of the economy - I’m talking about regular GVA figures. It’s also another reason to question how serious the folks in Cardiff Bay are about tackling the deep seated economic problems Wales faces, but that's for another post.

The Office of National Statistics does produce GVA figures for the Welsh economy once a year, but they are published before Christmas and get lost in the froth of Christmas and New Year stories. And that’s not the only problem the figures published always relate to the previous year, i.e. the latest figures of 74.3% from December 2009 are for the 12 months of 2008. It means they are already a year out of date when they are published which makes them easy to dismiss by WAG Ministers and for the Opposition to use to hold the Government to account.

I can understand why WAG would be reluctant to push for publication of quarterly figures because Wales has been at the bottom of the UK table for a decade with declines year on year to the point where Wales now stands at almost 26% below the UK average.

Add to that the fact it would also show up the failures of both UK Labour and Conservative Government policies towards the Welsh economy over the decades and you can see why there is such reluctance to change the status quo.

But other parts of the UK manage it without the sky falling in, most noticeably in Scotland, where the Government next set of GVA figures for the second quarter of 2010 are to be published on October 20th.

And it’s not just in the UK that these figures are published by national or regional Governments, the Catalan Government produces regular growth and unemployment figures. The latest growth and unemployment figures for the second quarter of 2010 were published at the beginning of August.

Both examples show that accurate and regular figures can be produced contrary to what the former First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s claimed when questioned on the matter by the Opposition last year, but I’m not expecting anything to suddenly change under Carwyn or Ieuan sadly.Any source