You may have heard the news that the size Nigeria's economy now stands at nearly $500 billion. Taken at face value (as many commenters have seemed all to happy to do) this means that the West African state "overtook" South Africa's economy, which was roughly$384 billion in 2012. Nigeria's reported GDP for that year was $262 billion, meaning it roughly doubled in a year. How did this "growth" happen? As Bloomberg reported: On paper, the size of the economy expanded by more than three-quarters to an estimated 80 trillion naira ($488 billion) for 2013, Yemi Kale, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference yesterday to release the data in the capital, Abuja....

The NBS recalculated the value of GDP based on production patterns in 2010, increasing the number of industries it measures to 46 from 33 and giving greater weighting to sectors such as telecommunications and financial services.

The actual change appears to be due almost entirely to Nigeria including figures in GDP calculation that had been excluded previously. There is nothing wrong with this, per se, but it makes comparisons completely unrealistic. This would be like measuring your height in bare feet for years, then doing it while wearing platform shoes. Your reported height would look quite different, without any real growth taking place. Similar complications arise when comparing Nigeria's new figures to other countries', when the others have not changed their methodology.

Nigeria's recalculation adds another layer of complexity to the problems plaguing African development statistics. Lack of transparency (not to mention accuracy) in reporting economic activity makes decisions about foreign aid and favorable loans more difficult. For more information on these problems, see this post discussing Morten Jerven's book Poor NumbersIf you would like to know more about GDP and other economic summaries, and how they shape our world, I would recommend Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories (somewhat technical), The Leading Indicators, and GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History.