Growing discrepancies between Russia's official industrial production statistics and independent estimates are raising questions among economists about the reliability of government data at a time when policymakers are trying to gauge the strength of the wartime economy.
Since the start of the year, assessments of Russia's industrial growth have diverged sharply from figures published by state statistics agency Rosstat.
In April, the government-linked Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMAKP) estimated that industrial output stood 11% above its average 2021 pre-war level, compared with Rosstat's estimate of 14.5%, a gap of 3.5 percentage points that analysts say is unusually large.
CMAKP said such a large divergence had not been observed previously and argued that Rosstat's figures had become internally inconsistent.
Rosstat reported that industrial production grew 1.9% in April from a year earlier. However, CMAKP noted that multiplying together Rosstat's published monthly production changes over the preceding 12 months produces an annual growth rate of 6.1%, far above the official year-on-year figure.
