Les statistiques et l'UEM

Bien que les données statistiques soient essentielles au bon fonctionnement de l’Union économique et monétaire (UEM), la gouvernance statistique européenne a peu attiré l’attention des responsables politiques et de la doctrine, à tout le moins jusqu’aux déclarations erronées des autorités grecques à la fin des années 2000. D’importantes leçons ont été tirées de cette expérience et des changements législatifs substantiels ont été introduits dans la législation européenne depuis 2009 – avec une mention spéciale pour le règlement cadre révisé n°223/2009 sur les statistiques européennes et le règlement n°1173/2011 qui, entre autres, attribue à Eurostat des pouvoirs d’enquête sans précédent et au Conseil le droit d’infliger des amendes aux États membres en cas de manipulation des statistiques relatives au déficit public et à la dette publique.

Statistics and Democracy: A Long Story about Trust and Resentment

In January 2022, the New York Times revealed, via a review of internal e-mails, all the ingenious ways that the administration of President Donald Trump had tried to manipulate the results of 2020 United States Census for domestic political gain. Even if most of these plots did not succeed, the story is reminiscent of similar efforts at fudging the numbers on the part of the government of Greece at the start of the 2000s. There the goal had been to misrepresent national debt and deficit statistics so as to sway international politics, specifically that nation’s joining of the European Union. This breach ultimately led the European Union to change the rules on data reporting and to produce new penalties for relaying misleading information, but similar stories, from the cooking of the books on unemployment and poverty numbers in Hungary to the falsification of Covid rates across much of the globe, continue to make news. And conversely, when data reporting is actually accurate—as in the vote tallies after the last US presidential element in 2020—such findings are now often not accepted as such by a wide swathe of the public which has become convinced, with the help of oppositional, right-wing parties, that official information cannot be trusted and measurable victories are hoaxes. Is it any wonder that one of the dominant narratives of our times is that “truth” is singularly in trouble these days, indeed that misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy thinking have taken over public life?

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