Musharraf’s creative national accountants messed up the data to such an extent that now they themselves cannot read it properly. Fiscal year 2003-04; 2004-05, in which they achieved “historic GDP growth and poverty reduction”; and 2005-06 are full of idiosyncratic numbers. For instance, GDP growth in 2003-04 was an impressive 7.5 per cent. It was based on a more than doubling of growth in large scale manufacturing (18.1 per cent) in a single year! This was despite the fact that real total fixed investment declined by six per cent and investment in large-scale manufacturing by 4.6 per cent. With a decline of 2.2 percentage points of GDP in total fixed investment, growth could have come only from consumption! A Nobel Prize should have been awarded for this innovative formula of growth without investment. But wait, 2003-04 was adjusted to correct the base for the master stroke in 2004-05 when GDP growth resulting from creative accounting was shooting through the roof and into double digits. It was contained to nine per cent with great difficulty by showing a 13.5 per cent real increase in total fixed investment. Gross investment was jacked up by increasing, without any basis, the value of stocks by 7.3 per cent in real terms. Stocks do not change so rapidly. In 2003-07, this was changed with impunity.
