Best Linear Unbiased Disaggregation of Annual GDP to Quarterly Figures: The Case of Malaysia

Long series of quarterly GDP ®gures are still not available for many countries. This paper suggests an empirical procedure adapted from Chow and Lin (1971) to derive quarterly estimates from annual GDP ®gures and produces quarterly GDP by sectors for Malaysia from 1973Q1 onwards. A comparison of these estimates with some univariate interpolations using published quarterly ®gures for recent years show that the use of related series can produce substantially superior estimates of GDP compared to univariate methods. The data set is available from the authors.# 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.