Brussels, 17/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, announced on Thursday 16 January that it will revise upwards the EU's annual gross domestic product figures by 2.4 percentage points when it switches to a new accounting standard in September, part of a worldwide move to a new accounting system called System of National Accounts 2008, already implemented in the United States last August.
“The weighted average impact on GDP of methodological changes is an increase of 2.4 percent of GDP, of which 1.9 (around 80 percent of the total impact) is due to the capitalisation of research and development. The remaining methodological impact is due to different elements, the most important of which is capitalisation of military expenditure which represents 0.1 percentage point”, the European Commission said in a statement.
The national breakdown of the GDP increase is as follows: - between 4% and 5%: Finland and Sweden; - between 3% and 4%: Austria, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; - between 2% and 3%: Germany, Belgium, Denmark and France; - between 1% and 2%: Spain, Estonia, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia; - between 0 and 1%: Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. No estimates are available for Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Greece or Malta.
The United States already applies the new calculation methods, which gave its GDP a boost of 3.5% for 2010, 2011 and 2012. (MB/transl.fl)