“The INE’s statistics are credible and reliable,” an official at the statistics office told Lusa News Agency when asked to comment on the criticism.
“The INE considers there are no reasons to bring into question the credibility and reliability of the official Portuguese statistics that it produces.”
The official noted that INE statistics “are produced in line with the 15 principles of the Code of Conduct for European Statistics in the framework of the European Statistical System” of the European Union, and that it works according to rules and methodological practices “that are public”.
As for the revision of data, the INE official said that these are an “integral and inherent part of the process of producing statistics” and that numbers “are generally subject to revisions” that are “above all the result of new information about the past that it was not possible to integrate in time in the earlier publication”.
In the last fortnightly debate in parliament, the prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, noted that “INE in the past few months has made major revisions to its own data”, referring in particular to figures for unemployment.
“We’re not in a position to formulate an explanation for what happened,” he told members of Parliament.
“It was a major revision. INE cannot revise a statistic like that without giving a serious basis for that decision.”
More recently, in a television interview, the deputy leader of Coelho’s Social Democratic Party, Marco António Costa, slammed what he called INE’s “systematic errors” and questioned “the reliability” of the numbers it releases. He stressed that he had “no doubts about the INE’s independence.”
In March, the statistics office revised up the jobless rate for January to 13.8 percent from the previously announced figure of 13.3 percent. In January, it had lowered the figure for November to 13.5 percent from the previously published 13.9 percent.
Last month the calculation of gross domestic product for 2012 was also revised, when the final national accounts for that year were made known. The economy had, it said, contracted by 4.0 percent and not 3.2 percent.
On the unemployment figures, the INE official, late last week, recalled that, since November of last year, the figures “relate to mobile quarters centred on the months in question and are calculated ... on the basis of incomplete information.” The jobless figures released at the end of the following month are, it stressed, provisional, with the final figure being released only a month after that.