Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the provision and quality of statistics for the macroeconomic imbalances procedure

This initiative fits into the political context of improving of the economic governance of the Union. Together with the Union strategy for growth and jobs, the European semester for the coordination of economic and budgetary policies, and the Stability and Growth Pact for the correction of government excessive deficits, there is a need to detect, prevent and correct macroeconomic imbalances.

For this purpose, Regulation (EU) No 1176/2011 set out detailed rules for the early detection, prevention and correction of macroeconomic imbalances which emerge or persist in the euro area and the EU (the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure or MIP). The MIP and its scoreboard of indicators require efficient statistical quality monitoring of the indicators and of the underlying statistical information.

The ECOFIN Councils of 8 November 2011 and 13 November 2012 underlined the importance for the credibility of the MIP of having timely statistics of the highest quality for inclusion in the scoreboard and invited the Commission (Eurostat) to take all necessary initiatives to assure a reliable procedure for the compilation of these statistics as well as a continuous improvement of the underlying statistical information.

There is therefore a need to develop a robust statistical monitoring system for the MIP based on a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council. This Regulation will cover the monitoring of data quality; the compilation and transmission of data and metadata; and the reporting/communication on the data to the different stakeholders and to the European Parliament and the Council.

The Regulation will introduce new tasks for the Commission (Eurostat) on the following main aspects: validating the quality of the MIP relevant data in relation to quality criteria that either exist already or will be further specified in certain areas; structuring, collecting and analysing Member States’ compilation sources and methods; developing and implementing an improvement action plan. The work on the MIP relevant data will need to be supported by good website publication and dissemination arrangements, as well as release actions.

The implementation of the draft Regulation with a view to providing high quality statistics will require close cooperation with Member States’ statistical authorities covering both the scoreboard data and the underlying statistical information.

EUR-Lex: COM(2013)342: Follow the progress of this proposal through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2013:342:FIN

ESO: Background information: Statistics: New rules to safeguard high quality, comparable statistics for the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure http://www.europeansources.info/record/press-release-statistics-new-rules-to-safeguard-high-quality-comparable-statistics-for-the-macroeconomic-imbalance-procedure/

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