INE admits fail to publish interim unemployment data – Jornal de Negócios – Portugal

To know sooner what’s going on? Or have greater accuracy of information? This is the dilemma faced by the INE. After a significant review of its May projection, the institute admits fail to publish interim unemployment data.

The story is already known. The National Statistics Institute (INE) published the May unemployment rate, placing it in 13.2%. When you had access to the final data corrected downwards to 12.4%. A review of 0.8 points, the highest since the INE started publishing monthly data. Now, the institute admits fail to publish provisional figures.

In a briefing organized at its headquarters, the president of INE, Alda Carvalho, and responsible for the statistics of the labor market, Sonia Torres, sought to clarify some doubts . The first was: where were wrong? “It was a mistake,” said Sonia Torres. “The methods are not concerned, which may be at issue is the assessment of the maturity of this society to have this type of provisional information.”

“There was a failure,” said Alda Carvalho. “The mistake of yesterday is the same as five years ago, resulting from the application of the methodology,” he said, noting that “revisions are the price to pay for brevity”. The president acknowledged that the INE was surprised by the revision of 0.8 points, but it has happened in the past with Eurostat “no one has been resentful of that.” When this type of result appears INE query their databases and their projection methodologies. What resulted from this evaluation? “The review did not justify us to do any changes.”

However, the controversy surrounding the numbers seem to be taking the INE to reconsider the publication of provisional data, trying to “anticipate the final estimates” in some days.

As for the controversy surrounding the numbers fostered by politicians, the president of INE declined to make direct comments, saying only in his opening statement that “the INE workers, regardless of habilitacionais and levels and personal convictions, are proud of the specificity and importance of INE’s mission for whose implementation is responsible and assuming it with high sense of responsibility, competence, professionalism and panache. ”