Eurozone economic statistics are still not good enough, the European Central Bank's top statistician said on Thursday, suggesting specific improvements the ECB would like to see within a year. Despite recent improvements, the statistics are still not optimal, ECB Director General of Statistics Steven Keuning said, and financial market analysts tend to focus more on US economic data, partly because they are considered more timely.
Keuning also told Reuters that national statistics offices were still not playing as a team, and EU statistics agency Eurostat could work better as team "captain".
"Euro zone statistics are not yet at the level we think they should be," Keuning said in an interview at a conference in Palermo, adding that he would encourage Eurostat to take more of a lead role to raise the standard.
The Dutch statistician also said the ECB would prefer Italy and Germany to stop publishing preliminary inflation data from sample cities and states every month before eurozone estimates.
"The Italian cities and the German states coming out before the euro zone flash estimate has the market second guessing the eurozone figure and just creates confusion," he said.
The ECB would also like to see national industrial output and GDP statistics released at the same time as Eurostat's data for the region as a whole, rather than preceding it.
To achieve faster and more reliable eurozone data for key indicators, countries must give Eurostat partial data to process, instead of the current system by which Eurostat often has to wait for complete national data before aggregating it.
The so-called "European sampling" advocated by Keuning had been "a success story" in the case of eurozone retail sales data, which he said could now be emulated for data such as industrial output and employment statistics.
"Employment statistics in particular are an area where the eurozone is really lagging behind, and they are important not just for information on labour markets but also for what they could tell us about productivity," he said.
Asked about other areas where the ECB would like to see progress in the next year, Keuning called for:
-- "A good and timely European property price index, as asset prices are increasingly important."
-- More information on HICP (Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices) components, in particular a sub-index net of changes in indirect taxes.
-- Improved data on service activity, another area where the eurozone is lagging the US He called for better services statistics both for producer prices and production.
Gently criticising Eurostat while praising progress made in recent years, Keuning suggested the agency might want to study the European System of Central Banks, which draws up timely data on eurozone balance of payments and monetary aggregates.
"The European central banks manage to work more as a team, with the ECB as the captain. The national statistics offices are still not a team and I think Eurostat could work better as a captain," he said.
Nonetheless, "there has certainly been an improvement and Eurostat is now taken more seriously by the Commission." Continuing the sporting analogy he acknowledged, without naming names, that some national statistics offices are inadequate. "But unfortunately we can't leave them on the bench."
Looking further ahead, Keuning said "economies of scale" make it easier for large countries to make necessary developments in their statistical output, and suggested that at some stage it may even make sense for a large country to produce and issue data on behalf of a smaller one.
Though it may seem odd to imagine, purely by way of example, Germany might draw up Belgium's jobless data or Spain might calculate Portuguese industrial output. "In general terms, I think thinking on this issue must start," he said.