MNI INTERVIEW 3: StatCan Nowcasts Possible If Revisions Small

By Greg Quinn

     OTTAWA (MNI) - Canada's statistics agency may move towards nowcasting

economic trends if digital data emerges that is robust enough to publish without

major revisions, a top official told MNI.

     Statistics Canada already gathers rapid information on farm crops using

satellites and sensors, Greg Peterson, assistant chief statistician for

economics, told MNI. Other rapid sources of data including retail scanners

suggest that kind of work can be expanded.

     "Strategically, that's where we'd like to go," he said in an interview in

his office last week. "The availability of different types of data sources, or

sensor data in particular; I think that gives us the opportunity to do some of

that nowcasting type exercise."

     "If you think about the availability of scanner data from retailers, from

other more frequent sources of data, for sure I think that that's kind of the

direction that we'd like to go towards," he said. "For sure shortening the

release time for our surveys, and if we can get to a point where we can produce

quality nowcasts, I wouldn't rule that out either."

     --NARROW GAP WITH US

     Such moves by Statistics Canada could narrow a gap with how fast it

publishes figures like quarterly GDP compared with the U.S. That can be a source

of frustration for currency and bond traders who use figures from both nations

as a foundation for their economic and financial forecasts.

     The BOC does internal tracking of GDP and some Canadian banks and think

tanks make their nowcasts of quarterly GDP public.

     "For us, data quality is still a really important concern, and we'll want

to make sure that if we get into that nowcasting game, we're not going to do it

in a way that when we're releasing data they're going to be so highly revised

that that initial estimate would not be believable," he said.

--MNI London Bureau; +44 203 865 3829; email: jason.webb@marketnews.com

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