Official Statistics—A Plaything of Politics? (eBook)

This book describes official statistics as a tool to hold up a mirror to society - but also as an instrument for those who can manipulate this mirror. It addresses the precarious interaction of politics, official statistics, and ethical principles. Three sets of themes can be derived from this relationship, which are the focus of this book: Political systems and guiding principles, official statistics as a science of the state, and ethical issues arising from them. Ultimately, the determining factor is the political system that exists in each case.

The book contains eleven chapters. The first three focus on the key concepts of the book: power and morality, official statistics and policy making, and ethical principles for statistical work. Three further chapters focus on episodes that illustrate, as 'drastic' examples, the misuse of official statistics over the past hundred years, covering the situation in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich and Greece. The remaining five chapters take up current topics that pose particular challenges to official statistics. These are the phenomena paraphrased by digitalisation, globalisation, happiness research, overpopulation, migration, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change.

The book is primarily aimed at statisticians working in national and international statistical institutions, but also at readers interested in statistics, national accounts, economic and statistics history, and ethical issues.

Dr. Reimund Mink worked as Senior Advisor in the Statistics Department of the European Central Bank (ECB) until 2011. Since 2011, he has worked as an economic advisor to the ECB, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis) in Greece, in Jordan and in Serbia. He was a member of the Advisory Expert Group on the revision of the 2008 System of National Accounts and of the IMF's Government Finance Statistics Committee on the revision of the Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014. He was also involved in the revision of the European System of Accounts 2010 and co-chaired the Eurostat/ECB Working Group on Pensions. In recent years, he has contributed to the production of several manuals: the ECB-Eurostat Handbook on Pensions, the BIS-ECB-IMF Handbook on Securities Statistics and the United Nations - ECB Manual on Financial Production, Flows and Stocks. During his career, he has been Head of Financial Accounts in the Economics Department of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Senior Economist at the IMF and Economist at Destatis. His publications relate to national accounts, financial accounts and balance sheets, money, credit and securities statistics, government finance statistics, financial services statistics, and pension scheme statistics.