Statistics New Zealand says reinsurance and insurance claims from earthquakes in the Canterbury region will be recorded as capital transfers instead of current transfers in balance of payments statistics.
Statistics New Zealand says reinsurance and insurance claims from earthquakes in the Canterbury region will be recorded as capital transfers instead of current transfers in balance of payments statistics.
"The balance of payments statistics will no longer show these flows in the current account balance," Statistics New Zealand said in a release.
"This treatment means that New Zealand's key economic statistics better reflect our economic position, avoiding distortion from the insurance claims," it said.
It made the announcement as re-insurance flows for the Christchurch earthquakes boosted the balance of payments to an apparent surplus even as some economists said the underlying current account deficit may have worsened.
The nation was estimated to have recorded a current account surplus of $3.7 billion in the three months ended March 31, according to a Reuters survey of 14 economists.
Economists at Westpac Banking Corp. estimated that some $6 billion of reinsurance flows may have been recorded in the first quarter, which they predicted -- before the Statistics NZ announcement -- would give a "substantial, sharp and temporary improvement" in the balance of payments.
Westpac chief economist Dominick Stephens forecast that multibillion-dollar reinsurance flows would dominate the headline this quarter, with the transfers balance set to swing to a surplus of $5.95 billion from a deficit of $12 million in the fourth quarter of last year and from a surplus of $167 million a year earlier.
But the actual impact of reinsurance flows was also confused by the government statistician's estimate of their size, which it under-estimated in the final quarters of 2010, only to be revised upwards strongly.
Goldman Sachs & Partners economist Philip Borkin estimated that excluding those flows and the impact of tax cases against the nation's major lenders, the annual current account gap widened to 4.4 percent of GDP in the first quarter from 3.2 percent in the same three months of 2010.
The range of forecasts was unusually large for the first quarter, with a surplus seen in a range of $100 million to $6.69 billion, according to the Reuters survey. For the year, estimates ranged from a deficit of $4.44 billion to a surplus of $2.15 billion.
