Macroeconomic Statistics Liaison Group Meeting
Location: Central Statistics Office&
Date: 17th September 2015
Attendees: Seamus Coffey, Eddie Casey, Loretta O’Sullivan, Brendan O’Connor, Niall Conroy, Martin O’Brien, Michael Connolly, Christopher Sibley, Paul Morrin, Orla McCarthy
NIE/QNA related queries
Compensation of employee data
- The differences between implied earnings from COE data in National Accounts and other sources, such as EHECS, were questioned. There was also a question about the reason for the large revisions.
- CSO said that these differences have been investigated. The revisions were due to improvements to the data, the current data now agrees more closely with other sources. It was noted that National Accounts is consistent with QNHS data
- CSO said that there are plans to develop and improve COE data further, by incorporating other data sources including P35 income tax data in the new National Accounts IT system which will hopefully be in place for the NIE next year.
Impact of aircraft leasing
- CSO capital stocks release is due in November; this will give additional information on impact of aircraft leasing. The presentation of the data will be the same as before, but may also have a separate R&D breakdown. This release will address many of the questions on aircraft leasing.
Effect of inversions
- The CSO recently published a note quantifying the impact of inversions on the data. This was distributed and discussed at the previous press conference for the Quarterly and Annual National Accounts. A similar note will be published annually.
- It was confirmed that the inversions have no impact on GDP, but a significant impact on GNP/GNI due to the retained earnings staying in Ireland. The effect of this is to increase Ireland’s payments to the EU by ~€60million extra per annum. The possible long term trends were discussed.
- CSO clarified that these inversions have little impact on trade balances and are not contributing to the differences seen between Merchandise trade and National Accounts/BOP trade.
Government consumption
- There was a large revision to consumption of fixed capital for government. Much of the government data is only available annually so quarterly data can be subject to large revisions. CSO agreed to investigate why the latest set of data is not currently available on Eurostat’s website.
Chain linking methodolog
- Guidance was sought on the best practise for chain linking. The CSO agreed to look for a document or technical note which would explain this clearly.
General revisions policies
CSO explained the revisions timetables: all revisions are aligned for the NIE publication, usually at the end of June. BOP data is revised back for 2 years, National Accounts is revised back to 1995. BOP is only revised annually, but the QNA is revised on a rolling quarterly basis. Supply-Use tables are not revised as they are a point in time analysis.
It was noted that the ONS has a good presentation of revisions, in the form of a revisions pyramid, and it was suggested that the CSO should produce something similar. There was also a request for the CSO to produce additional information at press releases explaining large revisions.
Several people commented on the large increase in PCE in the latest NIE. CSO explained that there were some specific items that had led to this: upward revision of insurance, rents and health.
General dissemination policies
There were several suggestions for improvements to the Statbank:
- all published data should be available on the Statbank
- detailed trade data should be on Statbank as the pdf format is not user friendly
- px format for outputs is not user friendly
- problems with inconsistent labelling and ordering of columns
CSO said there is an office policy that all data should be on the Statbank and that the content is being improved all the time. They distributed information on a recent initiative to release the data in JSON format which will facilitate automated downloading and machine reading of the data.
There was also a request for the press release to be broadcast online in some format for people who are not able to attend on the day. CSO noted that in future they plan to publish the slides from the press release on the website.
Auxiliary MIP indicators
CSO is planning to publish additional indicators and looked for feedback from the group on which would be of most value and interest.
One suggestion was that auxiliary indicators that are linked to “flash points” on the scoreboard would be useful.
Overall response to the new publication was very positive.
Specific release information
Additional NIE tables will be published at the end of the month.
Sectoral accounts Q1 2015 data will be published next week.
Any other business
The next meeting is planned for mid-December after the QNA release.
No further items were raised and the meeting closed.
