The Gross Regional Domestic Expenditures (GRDE) is intended to complement the current series of the Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP), which is being prepared by the Economic Statistics Office (ESO) of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB). GRDE is defined as the expenditure of residents of the region in the domestic territory plus their expenditures in other regions including the rest of the world.

The GRDE is still in its developmental stage since NSCB is constantly improving the GRDE by coordinating with various agencies for the improvement of the data support for this set of accounts. At present, the NSCB was able to shorten the time lag of GRDE from two (2) years to one (1) year. The latest GRDE available is for 2001 to 2003.

In using the GRDE for specific studies or analyses, the following points should be considered:

1. The GRDE estimation usually starts with the national estimates, which is broken down to regions using indicators of regional distribution.

2. The regional structure of the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) basically followed that of the regional structure of the household expenditures from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO). It is assumed that the structure of non-profit institutions serving households is the same as that of the households.

3. General Government Consumption Expenditures (GGCE) is independently estimated by region using data from the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).

4. For construction, the under coverage ratio for private construction is assumed to be uniform across regions because there are no data currently available to estimate the under coverage ratio for each region. For public construction, the national deflator was used for all regions to arrive at the constant price estimates.

5. The regional distribution for durable equipment utilizes the new fixed assets of the current Annual Survey of Philippine Business and Industries (ASPBI) and the Census of Philippine Business and Industries (CPBI) conducted by the NSO. However, since the latest ASE/CE was not available during estimation of the GRDE, indicators from the GRDP of the Manufacturing sector, published by the NSCB, were used. As such, the estimates were affected by the availability of data from the said surveys.

6. For changes in stocks, inventory data of selected agricultural commodities are readily available. For the other sub-sectors, e.g. crude oil and petroleum, different indicators were used to obtain the regional distribution. For instance, data on the regional storage capacity from the Regional Downstream Facility of the Department of Energy (DOE) was used to distribute crude oil and petroleum products. For the government sector, the regional distribution of the Maintenance and Other Operating Expense (MOOE) from the COA was used to estimate the regional changes in stocks. For the establishment sector, the regional changes in stocks were estimated by distributing the national estimates using the regional distribution of the Gross Value Added (GVA) of the manufacturing and trade sectors from the GRDP.

7. In the absence of data on regional trade flow, net export was derived as a residual item. Hence, net export refers to the combined effect of the income flows between regions, the commodity flows between regions and the rest of the world and statistical discrepancy.