Virgin Islands participated in a weeklong session with officials from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Census Bureau and the Office of Insular Affairs in Honolulu, Hawaii, a media release stated.
he participants were welcomed by Nikolao Pula, director of the Office of Insular Affairs, who stressed the importance of the gathering.
The session was aimed at the collection of data required for the development of the island areas’ Gross Domestic Product.
The GDP is a measurement of the economic health used to determine the direction of change of an economic jurisdiction within a specified period of time.
“Without a GDP measure, it becomes very difficult to quantify the direction of the economy. It is common for people to generalize that the economy is in bad shape, but no one can quantify to what extent. This measure is important as it provides data on which way our economy is moving and to what extent the change is year-over-year”, said Commerce Secretary Michael Ada.
The National Income and Products Accounts are accounts developed and used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop the final results of the National GDP, as they are one of the primary sources of data on economic activity in the nation.
All of the insular areas have gone without a GDP measure to date.
However, efforts have been on-going since early 2005 to develop such a measure.
Due to the small size and economic anomalies that exist within the island areas, it has been difficult to utilize the national GDP measures and apply them to the island areas.
“This session was very helpful as it allowed the island governments to understand what data is important for the BEA to collect in order to arrive at the GDP’s for each of the jurisdictions. We were able to provide wage data, sales revenues, and other economic data to aid the BEA in their analysis and calculations,” said Marie Muna, of the Electronic Data Processing Division of the CNMI Department of Finance.
