Financial Times
September 9, 2011
In the late 1990s, eurozone wannabes squeezed and stretched to meet the criteria for accession, including low inflation and government deficits, and moderate levels of debt. The criteria were somewhat irksome, especially for an economy such as Greece, but nevertheless the Greeks seemed to comply.
Eventually, it became clear that the Greek numbers did not quite add up. Eurostat, the European statistics agency, has complained about “widespread misreporting of deficit and debt data” from the Greek authorities. In 2006, eyebrows were raised when Greece’s GDP jumped 25 per cent overnight thanks to a statistical revision that sought to incorporate prostitution and money laundering, among other industries. In late 2009, the incoming prime minister announced that the deficit was more like 12.5 per cent of GDP than 3.7 per cent.
Had its economic statistics been more rigorously reported, it seems unlikely that Greece would have made it into the eurozone. But could the anomalies have been spotted at the time? Perhaps so.
I’ve written about Benford’s Law before: it’s a statistical regularity that often occurs in “real” data but not in manipulated numbers. Now four researchers have published a paper using Benford’s Law to examine Greek macroeconomic data. (Perhaps the origin of the paper should not be a surprise: it’s by Bernhard Rauch, Max Göttsche, Gernot Brähler and Stefan Engel, and it’s published in the German Economic Review.)
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