Official Statistics—A Plaything of Politics?

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.

Introduction.- 1 Power and Morality.- 2 On the History of Statistics and Policy Making.- 3 Ethical Norms for Statistical Work.- 4 Censuses in the Soviet Union and Afterwards.- 5 Population Statistics and the Final Solution under National Socialism.- 6 Greece's Reckoning with an Honourable Statistician.- 7 Digitalisation and a Pandemic.- 8 Globalisation and Official Statistics.- 9 Ireland's Miraculous Economic Growth.- 10 Happiness and Happiness Researchers.- 11 National Egoism or International Cooperation.- 12 World-View Statistics.- Conclusions.- Bibliography.