-TheCitizen.in NEW DELHI: Perhaps no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetization debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to the palpable failure of the demonetization measure to achieve its purported objective, which was to cripple the black economy, the government kept harping, in its justification, on the extraordinary...

-The Indian Express GDP estimates are advance figures, but by the time they are revised only staid economists will be interested in them Unless we simply dreamt it, demonetisation delivered a massive shock to the economy in early November, which continued well into December because of slow pace remonetisation. The ensuing liquidity crunch affected most informal economic activity and some formal business, and economists generally agreed that declines in demand and disruption...

-The Indian Express On the credibility of quarterly data releases, Anant underlined “it is a careful statistical exercise” and that in many areas, “more complete information would be available in many ways by next year”. Facing criticism that GDP growth estimates by his office of 7 per cent for the third quarter ending December 2016 sharply overshot most projections — even those in the Economic Survey and by the RBI — India’s...

-The Telegraph Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi could well choose to crow about the 7 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter of 2016-17 which, he believes, has blunted criticism about his demonetisation drive and its widely anticipated crippling impact on the economy. But analysts have started to focus attention on how the Central Statistics Office (CSO) "cooked" the numbers of the third quarter of 2015-16 to make the growth rate...

-The Economic Times The enigma around the GDP growth numbers has compounded, as it understated the impact of demonetisation. Eliminating the dissonance created by large revisions, nominal GDP growth in December quarter may have been impacted by 240 bp and 320 bp on a year-on-year and sequential basis, respectively. The 7 per cent real GDP growth print for Q3FY17 released by the CSO on Tuesday gives an impression that the demonetisation shock...