Please bear with my fluid physics analogy as much as you can (It was something of a first love for me in college, one I can never forget...and somewhat highly relevant too given a fluid is a macro-entity of many much more individual constituents and the forces that govern them):
All "stats" are not the same rubbish. Rather they are different levels of rubbish (and have to be qualified, sorted as to which ones are less toxic to play around in)...some even stop being rubbish all together if certain criteria can be met. If you go to a landfill, you can sometimes find stuff that should never have been thrown away for example and are worth huge amounts of value still etc....but again you need a criteria to go about finding such things.
I for one very much find the ones specified by the GDDS (IMF standards) to be fairly credible because they are quite upstream (laminar) data that is highly standardised (and cross-verified)....i.e the good relevant balance of enough distance from the source introduction (which is hidden from us and we want to measure in some way)... but not too far down with data disturbances/entropy effects.
Downstream (turbulent, disturbed) data has some level of signal loss (no longer laminar flow). Also streams that are not even that developed and broad do not have the requisite developed flow to sample effectively in first place (the signal just was not good and coherent enough to begin with)....so it would be foolish to compare apples to apples with those that have developed flow and much higher SNR. This would be why comparing unemployment data of India is silly compared to unemployment data of say France, UK, US, Japan etc.
This is why I say the data streams have to be broadened (before our dippy stick strategy to measure elements of the flow becomes sufficiently relevant and broadly standardised and comparable with the original concept/reason of measuring it)....but in many ways that needs the source flow (economy) to also broaden much more. Something of a catch 22 situation....which is why we have to debate and discuss which stats are most relevant to India's particular stage of development right now and what are the best priorities for measuring and debating on. Its broadly the more simple, directly sampled stuff that India is already big/coherent enough on right now...to measure and standardise with others and for policy goals. The more indirect and micro-derived level you go....the worse the signal loss and thus relevance. They will broaden and gain relevance down the road....its not a case of India is a country that should focus on every statistic possible....we must be choosy....we are growing the cake still....rather than deliberating on the icing and presentation and number of candles to put on it and what our next cake should be like etc.
This applies to every country/macro-entity in the world.
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