The holder of The Third of today March 20 is : ‘Size of chilean economy about US$ 250 billion and it doubles in 6 years’ (click here for the news). And the first thing one says is how the journalists don’t look at what they write? On the same note we are told that Chile grew at 4.8% in those years. Now, there is no way that a growth of that level to double the economy in 6 years (in fact, we could double growth and not duplicaríamos the size of the economy in that period).
What happened? The journalists, and in particular the journalist of the holder, has problems to read data. The original data come from the Report of National Accounts Central Bank (report here). Now, the original data are the following:
The Third then tells us that the year 2003 the GDP was 123.445 thousands of dollars, and the year 2011 of 248.593 thousands, so the economy doubled. But there is something that The Third is not fixed: the data are clearly nominal (current dollars), are not real dollars. In other words, in between there are things such as inflation and variations in the exchange rate. In fact, but there is another fact that is even more shocking: that the per capita GDP almost tripled between 2003 and 2011, and that clearly has not happened.
If someone thought that The Third was not wrong, it is a matter of applying the growth rates from the year 2005 onwards. Use a base of 100 for 2005, apply the rate of growth that raises the Central Bank (in fact, apply to all years, the rate of growth of 2005 -6.2 – that is the highest rate of the period), use an Excel table if you want to (do it the easy way either). And see if it is possible that the economy will double.
It is one thing to not know how to read data, no one knows everything in life. But what no one jumped him in The Third that the data was unlikely to and did some queries? In order to.