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Division Current situation

United Kingdom

Original text. Later amendments are not shown.

The surveillance and coordination of macroeconomic policies in the EU, the conduct of monetary policy in the Economic and Monetary Union, as well as the Community structural policies, require a sound statistical underpinning. Furthermore, the provision of statistics for the administrative purposes of the EU is of utmost importance.

Eurostat and the Member States need to ensure a successful implementation of the European System of Accounts data transmission programme. This data is a key element for business cycle and structural analysis. A significant effort will be made to improve the measurement of productivity, fostered by the EU KLEMS project.

The provision of statistics for EU administrative purposes remains of the utmost importance. This includes the provision of GNI and value added tax data for own resources calculations, macroeconomic data required in support of structural policies (in particular Purchasing Power Parities), and data required for the salaries and pensions of EU officials.

Harmonisation and comparability of the data used for budgetary and fiscal surveillance will be kept under review in order to provide decision-makers with high quality and comparable statistical instruments to support sound judgements on the situation in each Member State.

In recent years the speed of the development of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) has slowed down and the improvement of the quality of the HICP needs to be pursued more vigorously (particularly on owner-occupied housing, quality adjustment and sampling).

A continuing improvement of timeliness, coverage and dissemination of the Principal European Economic Indicators (PEEI) is needed. This should be proportionate to the risks to the statistical quality in particular regarding the reliability of early estimates. As for short-term statistics (STS), improvements in the coverage of services, especially prices of service output, the length of time series and the timeliness of the data are required.

As regards balance of payments statistics, current challenges include the provision of appropriate input to national accounts, and ensuring the continuing quality of source data in Member States where bank reporting thresholds are being raised.

Main initiatives for 2008 to 2012:

  • there will be active participation in the revision of the international standards for national accounts (SNA93) and balance of payments statistics (BPM5),

  • the revised European System of Accounts (ESA95) will be implemented,

  • NACE Rev. 2 classification of economic activities will be implemented in national accounts, balance of payments and short-term statistics and other key legislation,

  • a European system of consumer price statistics centred on the HICP will be established, simplifying and consolidating the HICP legal framework, and ensuring the credibility of the HICP through a more effective communication policy and compliance strategy,

  • the coherence between labour market statistics and National Accounts will be improved.