Assessing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on seasonality: A study on select macroeconomic variables of India Mohan Renjith*, Bordoloi Sanjib Manager and Director, Department of Statistics and Information Management, Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai *Corresponding author email id: renjithmohan@rbi.org.in
Online published on 22 March, 2024. Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent containment measures employed worldwide led to unprecedented issues for analysts and efforts were coerced for finding suitable adaptions to the existing statistical models. COVID-19-induced higher volatility impede the ability of the prevailing pre-COVID seasonal adjustment models to detect the underlying seasonal patterns. In this paper attempt has been made to gauge the impact of COVID-19 in seasonal adjustment methodologies for select four macroeconomic indicators of the Indian economy, consisting of two price statistics, viz. monthly Consumer Price Index (Combined All India General Index) and monthly Wholesale Price Index and two output indicators, viz. monthly Index of Industrial Production and quarterly Gross Domestic Products. Empirical analysis suggests that pre-adjusting these indicators by India-specific variables such as supply disturbances, and governmentannounced measures to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus (represented by the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker Stringency Index for India compiled by the University of Oxford) improved the performance of the seasonal adjustment models during this crisis episode. Comparative assessment of these intervention-based models has been carried out based on the quality assessment statistics. Top Keywords Seasonal adjustment, Seasonal factors, X-13-ARIMA, Q-statistics, COVID-19, Supply disturbance, Stringency index, Price statistics, Output statistics. Top |