Suchergebnisse

This statistical paper describes and explains a specific tool enabling statisticians to gain additional insights and assess the consistency of government finance statistics (GFS): analysis of the deficit-debt adjustment (DDA), or stock-flow adjustment (SFA). The DDA reconciles two key government indicators - the government deficit/surplus and government debt. DDA analysis helps to establish whether these statistics are plausible and reliable by exploring the consistency between governments' non-financial accounts (measuring the government deficit/surplus) and financial accounts (measuring government debt at market value). It also takes into account valuation differences between the financial accounts and government debt measured at face value (Maastricht debt). Recent years' GFS for the euro area aggregate and the individual euro area countries (and, where useful, other EU Member States' data) are used to illustrate DDA analysis. The dataset bridging the government deficit and the change in government debt reveals many aspects of a government's economic policies. For instance, the components of the DDA shed light on its equity investments or privatisations, its use of investment in financial reserves, some aspects of its debt management and the accumulation of fiscal or social arrears.

The preparations for the introduction of the euro in 1999 involved the need for a new set of statistics for the euro area. Since then, significant progress has been made with regard to the coverage, timeliness and accuracy of these statistics. The reliability of the first releases - i.e. their stability in the process of later revisions - is an important quality-related feature. New data releases for the euro area have generally shown a very small or no bias, i.e. data revisions have been very modest and comparable with those of, for example, the United States or Japan. Despite the relatively small size of revisions, however, their combination with the low growth of the euro area economy may have drawn attention to such revisions of economic data for the euro area. This paper quantifies the revisions to selected key indicators in the period from the start of Monetary Union in 1999 to July 2007 and compares them with the corresponding medium term averages (1999-2006). The analysis covers the euro area, its six largest member countries, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan. For this purpose, available time series for the various periods involved are used, series that record all revisions to published statistical data releases. The analysis is carried out separately for GDP growth and its expenditure components, for employment, unemployment rates, compensation per employee, labour cost indicators, industrial production, retail trade turnover and consumer prices. Overall, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that euro area data releases have generally shown a very small or no bias and have been more stable than those for individual euro area countries. Furthermore, recent euro area data show levels of revisions similar to those of the past, or levels of revisions that stabilised after the implementation of harmonised statistical concepts had largely been completed.