Article by Olaf Storbeck: “Germany’s statistical office has suspended some of its most important indicators after botching a data update, leaving citizens and economists in the dark at a time when the country is trying to boost flagging growth.
In a nation once famed for its punctuality and reliability, even its notoriously diligent beancounters have become part of a growing perception that “nothing works any more” as Germans moan about delayed trains, derelict roads and bridges, and widespread staff shortages.
“There used to be certain aspects in life that you could just rely on, and the fact that official statistics are published on time was one of them — not any more,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist of Commerzbank, adding that the suspended data was also closely watched by monetary policymakers and investors.
Since May the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has not updated time-series data for retail and wholesale sales, as well as revenue from the services sector, hospitality, car dealers and garages.
These indicators, which are published monthly and adjusted for seasonal changes, are a key component of GDP and crucial for assessing consumer demand in the EU’s largest economy.
Private consumption accounted for 52.7 per cent of German output in 2023. Retail sales made up 28 per cent of private consumption but shrank 3.4 per cent from a year earlier. Overall GDP declined 0.3 per cent last year, Destatis said.
The Wiesbaden-based authority, which was established in 1948, said the outages had been caused by IT issues and a complex methodological change in EU business statistics in a bid to boost accuracy.
Destatis has been working on the project since the EU directive in 2019, and the deadline for implementing the changes is December.
But a series of glitches, data issues and IT delays meant Destatis has been unable to publish retail sales and other services data for four months.
A key complication is that the revenues of companies that operate in both services and manufacturing will now be reported differently for each sector. In the past, all revenue was treated as either services or manufacturing, depending on which unit was bigger…(More)”