Improving Economic Governance GRP estimates of the States for the last many years. Unofficial estimates are also avail ­able in Pakistan. 2 iii) Estimating a Consistent GDP series : The base year for the GDP estimates have been changed recently from 2005-06 to 2015-16. The new estimates are available from 2015-16 onwards. There is need for backward extrapolation of this time series to en ­able analysis of trends over the years. iv) Estimates of Poverty : There have been big changes in the incidence of poverty in the last few years. The last estimate of multi-dimensional poverty at the national, provin ­cial and district level was published by the Planning Commission for the incidence up to 2014-15. The source was the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey carried out periodically by the PBS. Fortunately, the most recent survey is of 2019-20. As such, data from this survey should be analyzed to give more recent es ­timate of the incidence of multi-dimensional poverty at the regionally disaggregated level in Pakistan. Similarly, estimates of poverty, based on fulfillment of basic nutritional requirements are of 2015-16. There has since been a Household Integrated Economic Survey in 2018-19. This should be used to update the incidence of basic needs poverty at the national and provincial levels. Improving the Consumer Price Index : There are a number of problems with the methodology used for constructing either the Consumer Price Index or the Sensitive Price Index, as follows: i) The largest weight is of housing rent. Housing is a very heterogenous service and re ­quires estimation of a hedonic price index. The methodology used for deriving the rate of inflation in housing rent is not indicated by the PBS. The problem is that the increase on a year-to-year basis in housing rent in November 2022 is reported as only 5.27 percent in urban areas of Pakistan as compared to the increase in the overall CPI of 21.56 percent. Therefore, there is the likelihood that the rate of inflation has been underestimated. ii) Price data is collected from 17 cities and towns in the country, ranging from the pri ­mate city, Karachi, to a small town, Khuzdar, in Balochistan. For example, the price of a wheat flour bag of 20 kgs ranges from Rs 1295 to Rs 2020 in the different locations in November 2022. The PBS is not taking the weighted average by population of the locations. Consequently, the national price is wrongly determined. Overall, there is substantial scope for improving the quality and coverage of statistics so as to enable faster and better policy responses. 2 Pasha, Hafiz A., Growth and Inequality in Pakistan, 2018. 189