-The Hindu The government must put the MCA-21 data under scrutiny and bring transparency in calculating corporate output About a third of non-government non-financial Companies in the services sector are not traceable is the finding of a National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey for 2016-17 that has just been released. Since such entities could be shell/fake/bogus Companies included in the MCA-21 database of “active” Companies used for estimating the gross domestic...

-Business Today A release from the government said that media has misinterpreted the out-of-survey enterprises to be enterprises that do not exist in the economy report. Refuting charges that the GDP numbers put out by the government may be over-estimated due to 'shell' Companies which are untraceable, the government has said that the extent of overestimation of GDP in all likelihood is marginal. Clarifying the problem pointed out by the Technical Report of...

-The Hindu Business Line Fears over shell Companies inflating the GDP are overdone, but the CSO needs to be more transparent in its methods Just as the dust was settling on the controversy over the Centre deferring the release of NSSO’s labour force survey which showed unemployment numbers in an unflattering light, a new one has broken out on the veracity of the MCA-21 database used in GDP calculations. The economic commentariat...

-The Hindu Shell Companies in MCA-21 submitting balance sheets regularly very much part of measurement, says former chief statistician The deficiencies found in the MCA-21 database of the corporate sector, where more than a third of the sample Companies were either untraceable, out of coverage, or closed, will not have a major impact on the calculation of GDP and GVA, according to prominent statisticians closely associated with the subject. A recent report by...

-The Hindu Business Line Such computation will underestimate GDP, says the former Chief Statistician The National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) recent study involving samples from the MCA-21 database has put the whole GDP computation methodology under fire, but on a wrong basis, according to former Chief Statistician of India Pronab Sen. The NSSO study had revealed that there are several more shell Companies in the system than what the Centre realised. Having numerous...