Author(s):
Dias, Maria Raquel de Almeida
Date: 2018
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/48100
Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Subject(s): Debt; Deficit; Excessive Deficit Procedure; Government Finance Statistics; Stock Flow Adjustment; Data harmonization
Description
Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Statistics and Information Management, specialization in Information Analysis and Management
Article 104 of the Treaty on the European Community establishes that Member States shall avoid excessive government deficits and that the European Commission should monitor the development of the budgetary situation and of the stock of government debt in the MS. For this effect, the 28 MS of the European Union are obliged to report biannually (in March and September) the detailed deficit and debt for the four reporting years. The deficit and the debt figures are of utmost importance for the correct functioning and control of the economy and therefore essential for the international organizations to monitor the economic developments in the different countries around the world: In the European Union, to avoid an excessive deficit, the EU Member-States should keep their deficit below 3 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Considering the following, data harmonization is crucial to ensure comparability of these figures among different countries and to guarantee it´s reliability. As the EC (through Eurostat) does not compile the deficit and debt figures but relies on data compiled and reported by the statistical authorities in the MS, this work aims to provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the quality of the data disseminated by Eurostat. As most of the macroeconomic aggregates, also the deficit and the debt are subject to revisions. These will be analysed to assess whether the governments of the different European MS attempt to manipulate these figures, for example, using residual amounts like the Stock-Flow-Adjustment. Data published in the Eurostat website through the Excessive Deficit Procedure Tables was evaluated from 2002 together with the Excessive Deficit Procedure inventories.