GDP Consistency in GTAP 8

From time to time, members of the GTAP network compare GTAP data with official statistics from national and international sources. This has recently been done for the GDP statistics in GTAP, v.8 (Wang et al., 2013), suggesting that there were significant discrepancies between GTAP statistics and official statistics. The purpose of this memorandum is to explain the reason for these apparent discrepancies and to demonstrate that the GTAP v.8 GDP statistics are indeed consistent with international macroeconomic source data.