EU statistics still incoherent due to national differences

Countries can no longer cook the books as Greece did for years in a row, but their reluctance to share data and adopt common accounting rules mean extra costs for the bloc's beefed-up statistics office.

January 2010 was to some extent 'D Day' for EU statistics. It was when Eurostat, after having expressed reservations for five years in a row, declared that the Greek authorities must have "deliberately misreported" their deficit data, Walter Radermacher, the chief of EU's statistics offi...