Eurostat, or the European Statistical Office (also DG ESTAT), is a Directorate-General of the European Commission, based in Luxembourg City. Eurostat's main responsibilities are to provide statistical information to the institutions of the European Union (EU) and to promote the harmonisation of statistical methods across its member states and candidates for accession as well as European Free Trade Area countries.
The partnership of Eurostat and the national organisations that cooperate with it is referred to as the European Statistical System, a term enshrined in EU legislation since 2009.
Name
Eurostat was originally established in 1952 as the Statistical Service of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, then upgraded in 1954 to Statistical Division of the HA-ECSC. It became the Statistical Office of the European Communities in June 1959, often referred to by its French acronym OSCE (for ). With the prospect of new member states making the handling of acronyms in multiple language increasingly onerous, the office decided in July 1972 to adopt the shorthand Eurostat in all its publications, with effect on .
As the European Communities became the European Union on , Eurostat's formal name became Statistical Office of the European Union. Since 1999, as all directorates-general of the European Commission were granted an abbreviated name, Eurostat has been referred to internally as DG ESTAT.
History 20th century
The need for a dedicated statistical capability was identified from the very start of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). At its 14th meeting on , the High Authority (HA-ECSC) decided to create a Statistical Service as one of its 12 initial divisions and services. By the end of 1952, the service had seven staff members including its head, German statistician .
On , Walter Hallstein, the first president of the newly created Commission of the European Economic Community (CEEC), announced that a Statistical Office would be established to serve the three European executive bodies, namely the HA-ECSC, the Euratom Commission, and the CEEC. The Statistical Office of the European Communities (French acronym OSCE) was formally created on by joint decision of the three bodies and absorbed a separate statistical service that had been established in the meantime by Euratom in Brussels. The OSCE remained led from Luxembourg by Wagenführ as its Director-General, but over two-thirds of its expanding staff was located in Brussels, in various buildings with several relocations during the 1960s. Eventually, in 1968, after the three executive bodies had merged to form the Commission of the European Communities, Luxembourg became the location for most OSCE employees. An "outstation" of ca. 15 staff, however, remained in Brussels in the Charlemagne building until it was significantly downsized in 1980.
In 1968, the Statistical Office approved the initial version of the European System of Accounts (ESA), its core set of common standards for government financial and macroeconomic statistics. Given widely divergent prior practices, 1975 was the first year in which all member states reported using ESA, which underwent its first revision in 1979. Meanwhile in 1974, the first domain in the statistical database Cronos databank was installed, marking Eurostat's entry into the digital era. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, Eurostat was plagued by a mix of bureaucratic conflicts and the broader challenges of European integration in that period (eurosclerosis), compounded by an inadequate legal framework for the sharing of confidential data.
As with other aspects of European integration, the deterioration was largely reversed in the later 1980s under the Delors Commission. A Commission regulation of established the Statistical Programme Committee, streamlining the process of managing the increasingly numerous workstreams involving Eurostat together with the member states' respective national statistical institutes. At the same time, the status of the Statistical Programme was upgraded to a Council recommendation with dedicated budgetary resources. In 1990, a new regulation on transmission of confidential data to Eurostat removed the longstanding obstacle to joint statistical work. The Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community, known by its French acronym NACE (for ), which had been adopted in 1969 to inform the OSCE's own work, was made compulsory in all member states by regulation adopted in October 1990. On , the Council of the European Communities established the Committee on Monetary, Financial and Balance-of-Payments Statistics (CMFB), thus laying a framework for the hitherto largely nonexistent cooperation between National Central Banks and Eurostat in the preparation of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
The CMFB established a workable division of labor between Eurostat and the European Monetary Institute then the European Central Bank (ECB): the latter was responsible for banking and monetary statistics; balance-of-payments and financial-accounts data was a shared area; national accounts and the price index remained under Eurostat. A regulation to unify the measurement of inflation was adopted on , establishing the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as common reference. The establishment of EMU also gave unprecedented salience to the ESA as the basis for the calculation of the euro convergence criteria ("Maastricht criteria") and the Excessive Deficit Procedure under the Stability and Growth Pact. The ESA's legal status was upgraded to a Council Regulation, initially (EC) 2223/96 of known among statisticians as ESA-95, replacing the previous ESA version from 1979.
On , the Council adopted regulation (EC) 322/97 known as the "Statistical Law", which further codified the member states' obligations, followed by a Commission decision of designating Eurostat as the sole Community authority entrusted with the production of statistics. European statisticians started to refer to the combination of Eurostat and national statistical institutes as a "European Statistical System", even though the statistical law of 1997 stopped short of granting that term official status. Later in 1997, the Treaty of Amsterdam (Article 213 A) included the first specific reference to statistics in the EU treaty framework. ESA-95 was first fully implemented by member states in 1999, in time for the introduction of the euro.
The dynamic expansion of Eurostat in the 1990s is reflected in the body's headcount, which, from just seven at the end of 1952, grew to 110 at end-1960, 220 at end-1970, 312 at end-1980, 388 at end-1990, and 639 at end-2000.
21st century
Eurostat was rocked by controversy in 2003, as its use of temporary staff and outsourcing of some tasks to external organizations, which staff unions had questioned since at least 1996, came under scrutiny. In response, the Prodi Commission in May 2003 removed three senior Eurostat officials from their posts, including longstanding Director-General Yves Franchet, and a number of contracts with outside companies were cancelled. Eurostat appeared to have used a double accounting system to transfer money to bank accounts not monitored by auditors, and inflated the value of some contracts, with questionable spending amounting to around €5 million between 1996 and 2001. No evidence was found of personal enrichment, however, and the malpractice was described as a response to onerous EU internal processes, which former Commission president Jacques Santer suggested was ultimately a consequence of the member states' unwillingness to give the Commission adequate resources to execute its tasks. €1.2 million was recovered in 2001.
In 2004, controversy of a different nature erupted in Greece. Following a parliamentary election in March, a new center-right government under Kostas Karamanlis took over after 11 years of rule by the center-left PASOK party. The new government claimed that its predecessors had engaged in massive statistical fraud to facilitate Greece's adoption of the euro and the financing of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and produced a landmark financial audit exposing the extent of the malpractice. In response, the European Commission on issued a communication and recommendation on the independence, integrity and accountability of the national and Community statistical authorities, establishing a "Code of Practice on European Statistics", strengthening the audit capability of Eurostat to prevent a repeat of the Greek episode. A peer review exercise followed, lasting until 2008. The next year, Regulation 223/2009 revised the EU Statistical Law first enacted in 1997 and incorporated the Code of Practice into it, thus giving it force of law throughout the EU.
The effort to strengthen Eurostat, however, did not prevent an even broader Greek fiasco at the next change of government following the 2009 parliamentary election and the return to power of PASOK. Shortly after the election in October, new finance minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou revealed that the Karamanlis government, far from re-establishing sound Greek statistical processes, had dramatically underestimated its own government deficit figures. The revelations exposed an appalling lack of independence in the national statistical institute, the National Statistical Service of Greece, which Eurostat had been unable to mitigate. This triggered the Greek government-debt crisis, which in turn morphed into a much wider euro area crisis that was not resolved until the later 2010s.
Eurostat subsequently published a report to try to rectify its procedures., The European Commission proposes powers for Eurostat to audit the books of national governments. This led to the revision in 2011 of the European Statistics Code of Practice by the European Statistical System Committee.
ESA 2010, which had been in the works since 2002, replaced ESA-95 in 2013. It remains the reference framework to this day.
List of Directors-General Name Nationality Term 1952–1966 Raymond Dumas 1966–1973 Jacques Mayer 1973–1977 1977–1982 Pieter de Geus 1982–1984 Silvio Ronchetti 1984–1987 Yves Franchet 1987–2003 Michel Vanden Abeele 2003–2004 Günther Hanreich 2004–2006 Hervé Carré 2006–2008 Walter Radermacher 2008–2016 Mariana Kotzeva (acting 2017–2018) 2017–current
Operations
Organisation Eurostat operates pursuant to Regulation (EC) No 223/2009. Since the swearing in of the von der Leyen Commission in December 2019, Eurostat is allocated to the portfolio of the European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni.
The Director-General of Eurostat is Mariana Kotzeva, former Deputy Director-General of Eurostat and President of the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria.
Regulations The Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of 11 March 2009 on European statistics establishes the legal framework for the European statistics.
The amending Regulation (EU) 2015/759 of 29 April 2015 clarifies that heads of NSIs coordinate national level activities for European statistics and decide on processes, methods, standards and procedures of their respective statistics.
Previous Eurostat regulations were a Decision on Eurostat (2012/504/EU), and the earlier Decision on Eurostat (97/281/EC).
Statistical work The Eurostat statistical work is structured into Themes and Sub-themes.
General and regional statistics Regions and cities Land cover/use statistics (LUCAS) International cooperation
Economy and finance National accounts (including GDP) ESA Input-Output tables European sector accounts Pensions in National Accounts Government finance and EDP Exchange and interest rates Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices (HICP) Housing price statistics Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) Balance of payments Economic globalisation
Population and social conditions Population: demography, population projections, census, asylum & migration