Growth Rates Preservation (GRP) temporal benchmarking: Drawbacks and alternative solutions

Benchmarking monthly or quarterly series to annual data is a common practice in many National Statistical Institutes. The benchmarking problem arises when time series data for the same target variable are measured at different frequencies and there is a need to remove discrepancies between the sums of the sub-annual values and their annual benchmarks. Several benchmarking methods are available in the literature. The Growth Rates Preservation (GRP) benchmarking procedure is often considered the best method. It is often claimed that this procedure is grounded on an ideal movement preservation principle. However, we show that there are important drawbacks to GRP, relevant for practical applications, that are unknown in the literature. Alternative benchmarking models will be considered that do not suffer from some of GRP’s side effects.