RSSeNEWS to be determined...

In a robust response to political pressures at home and revelations in Greece, Enrico Giovannini, chairman of ISTAT, the Italian national statistics institute, has called for strong legalisation to ensure the autonomy of national statistics agencies.

in an interview reported by Blommberg, Giovannini said; “The current practices are apparently not sufficient and need to be strengthened further”.

The European Commission established a code of good practice for official data in 2004 after the Greek government questioned – and revised – embarrassingly poor deficit and debt figures.

Former OECD chief statistician Giovannini said that Italy's debate on constitutional reforms should consider legislation to strengthen ISTAT's independence.

Alluding to the ways that governments can exert pressure on their statisticians, he said that “Both the legal and financial independence of statistics should be guaranteed, as is the case for central banks … Otherwise, there may always be ways to choke a statistics institute, such as cutting its funding, something which can’t happen with a central bank.

The European Central Bank and national central banks of EU member states are legally barred from taking or seeking government instructions.

Silvio Berlusconi's government has accused ISTAT of overstating unemployment figures and has questioned ISTAT’s methodology. Officials have asked it not to issue bad economic news on several occasions.

Giovanni commented that the “institutionalisation of statistics" should aim at "raising the integrity and independence from political pressures.”

He referred to the new Greek government's doubling of its predecessor's deficit figures in October 2009. This “took place again despite the efforts put in place then by the EU’s statistics office Eurostat to monitor the Greek data.”

Partly as a consequence of this revision, ratings agencies downgraded Greece's credit ratings. That in turn led to steep falls in national stocks and bonds.