The quality of official statistics seems to be going down everywhere, but Ireland just made a huge drop in quality, even though standards are going down everywhere.
The Central Statistics Office of Ireland said on Thursday that Ireland’s GDP shrank at a yearly rate of 1% in the second quarter.
Ireland doesn’t average its GDP figures every year like some other European countries do.
That’s important because on July 29, the statistics office said they thought the economy grew during the second quarter. They said it grew by 1.2% during the quarter.
That gives a very different picture of how the economy did in the second quarter.
That means Ireland’s economy is now the worst in the eurozone. In the second quarter, it was the fastest growing in the eurozone.
The office of data did say “I’m sorry.” They say that the data that came out on Thursday was based on both output and spending data, while the rough estimate is only based on output data. It also puts out the rough numbers in a new series it calls “frontier,” which uses different ways of putting the numbers together.
“Putting out results under the Preliminary Estimate lets the CSO give users useful new information and get feedback on these new methods and results while also making sure that the limits are clearly explained and understood,” the statistics office said.
Ireland’s records office isn’t the only one that’s having trouble. The U.S. just lowered its prediction of job growth by about 800,000 ones.
The U.S. Labour Department reports that response rates for many different types of data are all lower than they were ten years ago. When it comes to job openings, the answer rate has gone down from 66% in July 2014 to 33% this summer.
The British Statistics Office has been putting a disclaimer on its job data, saying that estimates should be taken with extra care because the sample numbers are smaller.
