Press Release: Statistics: New rules to safeguard high quality, comparable statistics for the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure

Robust new rules for compiling, monitoring and reporting statistics for the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) have been proposed by the European Commission on 7 June 2013. The aim is to ensure that the data used for the MIP is comparable, reliable and of the highest quality, so that Member States' macroeconomic imbalances can be efficiently identified and addressed at an early stage. Eurostat will be responsible for monitoring that the quality requirements are met on the statistics submitted by Member States, as well as for communicating this data. If any Member State deliberately misrepresents their MIP data, the Commission proposal foresees that sanctions could be applied.