JAPAN’S sickly economic numbers are set for a boost, with bureaucrats planning to modernize the way they measure household spending and scrap an antiquated survey that relies on elderly shoppers to weigh their groceries with kitchen scales.

    Household spending accounts for 57 percent of the world’s third-largest economy and has been in a funk for two years — or so it seems, according to monthly surveys which ask people to answer over 20 questions by hand and weigh groceries on state-provided scales before officials come to collect the forms.

    Completing the survey is a time-consuming task that lends itself to retirees, who are among the most frugal consumers and are now so over-represented in spending data as to understate the overall outcome, economists say.

    Respondents must log everything from the type of alcohol they buy to whether they pay by cash, credit card or voucher, and they must write exactly what they eat at restaurants.

    In addition to underweighting younger, higher-spending households which are more likely to shop online, the Family Income and Expenditure Survey is criticized for polling too few people: 9,000 respondents for a population of 127 million.

    Its bias toward the elderly raises other problems.

    “When I went out drinking, there were times my memory became vague and I couldn’t log the details accurately,” said a man who has recent experience answering the survey. “It’s impossible to log everything.”

    The government plans to bring the survey into the 21st century by adopting a big-data approach, harvesting transactions from credit card firms, travel agencies and retailers, including real-time point-of-sale data direct from cash registers, said two government officials.

    The government is considering collecting data from retail giant Aeon, but has yet to decide on exact data and could meet resistance from private firms, one of the officials said.

    An Aeon spokesman said the government was likely to face technical problems in accessing corporate data bases.

    “At Aeon, we currently have no database that is open to the government or the public,” the spokesman said.

    Japan would be the first to use big data in an official measure of consumption, experts say. However, government officials said it would not be ready to launch before 2019.

    In the meantime, weak survey data are hurting gross domestic product, which has shrunk for four of the past eight quarters. That in turn threatens Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to reflate the economy. (SD-Agencies)