KARACHI, June 4 According to provisional numbers released in the Economic Survey for the financial year 2010, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth stood at 4.1 per cent, representing a brilliant improvement over the 1.2pc last year.

The achievement was claimed to be in spite of severe challenges faced by the economy.

Interestingly, however, the Survey revises down the GDP growth of the previous two years (FY08 & FY09), which provided support to the headline growth rate for current year.

If the previous year's figures were held at what they were (provisional 2 per cent GDP growth last year), the effective growth in FY2010 would work out to 2.9pc and not at the high mark of 4.1 per cent.

The IMF and the Asian Development Bank had also forecast below 3.5 per cent growth for the current financial year. Economists have noted that the GDP growth target for FY2010 was originally set at 5.8 per cent. And as year progressed, the sun did not seem to shine that brightly on the economy, pushing managers to revise the target down to 3.4 per cent and then again to 2.5 per cent. Does that smack of a doctored growth?

Economists point out that there is a long history of such fudging of figures. The usual methodology to post a higher economic growth for the current year is to reduce the growth of the previous year.

As an example, the GDP figure for FY2008 was unveiled at 2.0 per cent, the country showing to have performed better than the rest of the regional economies. But the number was achieved by a hard work on cooking up figures with the earlier year's (2007-08) growth drastically revised downwards to 4.1 per cent from 5.8 per cent.

Economist Nadeem Naqvi asked to comment, said on Friday evening that it called to question the quality and integrity of all data from Federal Bureau of Statistics.

“How can anyone do any social or investment planning under such circumstances and how can economic policies be correctly framed? he asked.