In good democracies, bureaus of statistics and the ministers they report to are supposed to work together in providing accurate statistics to the public.
This week, the Fiji Bureau of Statistics has been publicly placed in the embarrassing situation that its own minister has made statements which do not match the official statistics the FBS has already issued.
What on earth can the poor FBS staff do in such a situation? Speak the truth and be sacked?
Or keep quiet to keep your job and feed your family? What would you do?
The minister’s claims
This week, the Minister of Economy issued a statement which was reported in The Fiji Times on July 28, as follows: “In 2002-03 poverty was 35 per cent, in 2008-09 poverty was 31 per cent, then it fell to 28 per cent in 2013-2014 and to around 24 per cent in 2019- 2020”.
Mr Sayed-Khaiyum then further applied these percentages to Fiji’s population for these years.
From this he drew the grand conclusion that the Bainimarama Government has lifted almost 100,000 Fijians out of poverty. If this analysis was correct, this would indeed be an astonishing economic accomplishment for the Bainimarama Government. But sadly, it is not.
The Fiji Times article of mine on May 15, 2022 (The Poverty Graph: is it really going down?”) has already pointed out the salient facts, based on the official statements made by the Fiji Bureau of Statistics itself. Let me repeat them here.
What FBS reported
The analysis by Mr Sayed- Khaiyum would be reliable if the percentages of Fiji’s population in poverty could be accurately compared with each other.
But they cannot, because the percentage of people in poverty in 2019-20 was derived by the FBS (and World Bank) using a totally different methodology from those in the previous surveys.
The Fiji Bureau of Statistics and World Bank themselves warned about this in a Joint Press Release a few weeks ago, in a section subtitled “Comparability of poverty and consumption in 2019-20 to previous years”.
“Fiji’s 2019-20 poverty estimates cannot be compared directly to 2013-14 or earlier estimates due to changes in methodology,” they said.
They gave two reasons for this statement. The first reason was that “poverty estimates in 2019- 20 are based on consumption, while those from previous years (2002-03, 2008-09 and 2013-14) have been based on income” (I will come back to this later).
The second more important reason was that “the national poverty line was also recalculated [reduced] in 2019-20 using consumption and the CBN methodology”.
The press release stated clearly that: “Due to these changes, the 2019-20 estimates of consumption and poverty are not directly comparable to those from previous years.”
Mr Sayed-Khaiyum has in fact been comparing the apples of 2019- 20 with the watermelons of 2002-03 and 2008-09 and 2013-14.
In other words, you cannot derive changes to the population in poverty by applying these different poverty rates to the population.
My previous article offered my rough estimates to suggest using FBS data that the incidence of poverty may have increased to around 50 per cent in 2019-20.
What can FBS staff do?
The public can ask themselves many questions arising from the fact that the minister’s statements this week – claiming that 100,000 Fijians have been lifted from poverty – directly contradict what the FBS and World Bank have themselves warned: you cannot compare the rates of poverty for 2019-20 with those of previous years.
First, are the minister’s statements an erroneous interpretation of the facts?
The press release was absolutely clear. Moreover, I had already pointed this out quite clearly in my The Fiji Times article of May 15, 2022 which I am sure Mr Sayed-Khaiyum reads quite assiduously.
Is it possible that the minister’s statement was because elections are just around the corner and voters might want optimistic assessments of the government’s poverty alleviation policies? Either way, it places the Fiji Bureau of Statistics in a terrible quandary.
How on earth can they contradict the minister, having seen only too recently what happened to former CEO Kemueli Naiqama when he issued statements on poverty by ethnicity, when the minister had decreed otherwise?
Can the FBS technical staff depend on the Fiji Public Service Commission to defend them in their lawful duty to provide public statistics to the people without any bias or favour to any political party of government?
The facts of many civil servants being terminated without due process (and some are still in court) would suggest otherwise.
But I sincerely hope that we don’t have more invidious forces at work.
Where are the reports?
When writing this article, I looked on the FBS website for that joint press release (around May 11, 2022) by FBS and the World Bank. I could not find it.
Nor could I find the poverty report based on the 2019-20 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES).
I have written to the FBS staff in case these official reports are somewhere on the FBS website and my doddery senile eyes cannot find them. I have no hope of any response from any of them, given their track record with my previous inquiries.
But “luckily” I had downloaded both when they first appeared on the FBS Website. I have now uploaded them both on to my website NarseyOnFiji so anyone can now download them: FBS 2019-20 HIES Main Report: https://narseyonfiji.wordpress. com/2022/07/28/fbs-2019-20- hiesfinal-report/ FBS/WB Consumption Revision Technical Note.: https://narseyonfiji.wordpress. com/2022/07/28/fbs-wbtechnicalnote-on-2019-20-hies-povertycalculations/ I sincerely hope that these two documents are somewhere on the FBS website and I am just unable to locate them.
The alternative explanation is far too frightful to contemplate.
• PROFESSOR WADAN NARSEY is a former Professor of Economics and Director of Planning and Development at USP. The views expressed are his and not shared by this newspaper.
