National accounts statistics and state estimates of domestic products: Some unresolved issues

The overwhelming importance of the unorganised sector in the national economy makes it imperative for the CSO and the State DESs to depend on benchmark surveys to estimate gross domestic product or net domestic product at the national and state level. This study highlights the differences between CSO´s estimates of NDP and the aggregate values of different state government´s estimates of net state domestic product. NDP in national accounts has been persistently higher than the sum of state estimates of domestic products. No long-term relation is also found between the trends in the share of agriculture in NDP and the sum of agricultural NSDP for all states. Interestingly, gap between the shares of industrial output to total domestic product in national and state estimates tended to widen since the mid-1990s when the process of infomalisation was afoot.