Germany’s national statistics body has had tech issues, as a failed IT update made key economic data points unavailable for people to access.
It’s been about four months since Destatis, the German Federal Statistical Office, updated its time-series data on critical topics, such as retail sales and hospitality revenues, to gauge the country’s economic health.
Destatis’ outages have been linked to a slew of tech issues just as it’s overhauling its methodology—a project that’s been underway for five years. The deadline for the overhaul is December.
However, recent tech troubles have meant that the statistics body of Europe’s largest economy hasn’t been able to post some economic data since May.
These data points are typically released monthly and cascade into the German GDP, the country’s biggest stressor.
“We have been flying blind for months and have no good understanding what is going on in the service sector,” Robin Winkler, chief German economist at Deutsche Bank, told the Financial Times.
Economists at other major banks have also griped about how the absence of data in areas like private consumption at a time when Germany’s economy is in the doldrums. Last year, Germany was the only major economy to shrink by 0.3% despite slowing inflation. It has stagnated into the current year, staggering “between hope and despair,” ING Bank said.
Consumer demand is an important piece of the puzzle in making sense of the German economy and how the appetite for retail goods and services.
While authorities have raised concerns over Destatis’s data blind spot, the body is managed by a patchwork of government departments, making it harder to make fixes immediately. The Interior Ministry looks at administrative matters, while the Economic Affairs Ministry oversees economic data reporting, according to the FT.
But Destatis holds that its calculations over the past few months, which the lack of data points has impacted, are of good quality.
Following the revamp of its methodology, the body has slowly started publishing some data, although much of that data is still not available.
Representatives at Destatis didn’t immediately return Coins2Day’s request for comment.
Statistics bodies have had to adapt in more ways than one lately. Take the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), for instance . It has had to shift away from phone-based surveys as fewer Gen Zers are picking up their phones. It also had to make big revisions to some of its GDP data due to methodological changes after the COVID-19 pandemic.
