The dust had hardly settled from South Sudan’s Independence Day celebrations before the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of South Sudan formerly known as the Southern Sudan Center for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, released the new country’s first estimate of GDP. The long-awaited figures were revealed at a well-attended press conference at the NBS on 16 August 2011. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the event, but I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days in late July in the company of NBS’ Director of Economic Statistics, David Chan Thiang, and his small team of dedicated economists and statisticians.
