Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-03-12-Speech-2-713-000"
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"en.20130312.53.2-713-000"2
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"Mr President, national and regional accounts are the cornerstone of all macroeconomic statistics and are the lens through which we look at our economies.
The agreed wording successfully reflects that.
The biggest sticking point came when four large Member States were reluctant to have mandatory transmission of pension liabilities data as provided for in the Budgetary Frameworks Directive under the Six Pack.
This was unacceptable to Parliament. We saw it as a blatant attempt to keep potentially embarrassing information out of the public domain and away from calculations. In order to press our point, we enlisted public support through the press. How are we to have an honest debate on public finances if Member States insist on hiding uncomfortable truths? After several more rounds of negotiation, we obtained agreement that all Member States will transmit that data. This is a good win for transparency and good governance.
There are other parliamentary achievements in the report, and I thank the shadow rapporteurs for their work on what many saw as a dull file. But, as I have explained, it had its moments of excitement and is also a fundamental tool to deliver proper economic governance.
Everyone agrees that getting the collection of European statistics right is vitally important. One should think back to the start of the economic crisis and realise that manipulating statistics or providing incorrect data can have a detrimental effect on the whole of the EU.
Indeed, it has long been an objective of this Parliament for statistics to be improved and the powers of Eurostat increased. However, Eurostat can only be as good as the statistics it receives.
We have done a lot in the Six Pack and the Two Pack to improve economic governance. In the budgetary framework of the Six Pack, it was agreed that there should be better reporting of public sector liabilities and an end to off-balance sheet accounting for governments. It takes good statistics to track that.
ESA 2010 consists of a regulation accompanied by two annexes. One consists of lists of data which need to be collected and which are quite self-explanatory. The other, the infamous Annex A, consists of the statistical and accounting methodology and is many hundreds of pages long. The lawyer linguists in the secretariat that checked this through and brought several points to my attention deserve a lot of thanks.
Among the various reforms, expenditure on R&D and weapons is transferred into capital formation, which reflects the economic situation. There are some knock-on effects on GDP and subsequent allocation of Structural Funds but these will not impact until 2020 and are small.
Deficit effects will also be monitored and are also expected to be small.
In the trialogues, the mission of the Parliament negotiating team was clear. We wanted good quality statistics, we wanted transparency and we wanted as few derogations to the obligations as possible.
Some smaller Member States do have resource-based reasons for not being able to provide Eurostat with the same volume of statistics as larger Member States, but we wanted to ensure that derogations are kept to a minimum, that they are constantly reviewed and that the Commission provides methodological support for Member States that need it, with a view eventually to discontinuing any derogation."@en1
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