Data revisions in India: Implications for monetary policy

This paper studies data revision properties of GDP growth and inflation for the Indian economy. The results show that revisions to GDP growth and inflation are significant, and cannot be characterized as either containing pure news or pure noise. We also find that there is a significant predictable component in the revisions to GDP growth and inflation. Our findings suggest that if the Reserve Bank of India were to follow a Taylor rule for its monetary policy formulation, then the interest rate based on the preliminary data would be much lower than the one based on the fully revised data.