The Minister for Finance will be asking the Malta Statistics Authority (MSA), the independent regulator for official national statistics, to investigate what may have led to an error by the National Statistics Office in the calculation of Malta's GDP, the Finance Ministry said this morning.

The minister will be requesting a detailed report including recommendations for the further strengthening of the institution.

The National Statistics Office said yesterday that the post production validation and checking process has identified a compilation error which had a significant effect on the Gross Domestic Product figure for the second quarter of this year. In September it was mistakenly listed as 1.7%, but was in fact recalculated to 3.6%.

Eurostat were notified accordingly.

The Ministry said that the error occurred within the NSO and was not contained in any upstream tax data it had provided. 

The preparations for the Budget were not expected to be affected by this one particular quarter.

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