The answer from most countries would be “nothing, because that is not going to happen.” Unfortunately, this is what happened in Argentina, starting in 2007, with the administration of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. It took 8 years and a new government coalition for the country to recover its Institute of Statistics (INDEC) and liberate it from ruling party interference.
Backtracking to the beginning, one must ask why the Kirchner government decided to intervene with the INDEC. The simplest answer is usually the correct one, and in this case, it was because the official statistics were unflattering to their administration.
They began by denying inflation, a variable for which both civil society and their political opposition heavily criticized them. The reported Consumer Price Index (CPI) published from 2007 to 2015 remained mysteriously low during their administration, resulting in 8 years of underestimated inflation.
In turn, this underestimation of inflation resulted in overestimating the population’s income level. Since Argentina measures absolute monetary poverty based on a poverty line, the underestimation of inflation likewise led to an underestimation in the number of poor people.
Underestimating inflation had another unexpected effect. As with the population’s income level, the country’s income level (i.e. GDP) was also overestimated. When Argentina defaulted in 2005, it had offered creditors a bond that paid according to GDP growth. In other words, the overestimation of the GDP forced the country to pay more interest on its foreign debt than it should have, had the correct data been used.
Intervening in the INDEC also generated duplication costs. In a country where the statistics office is credible, sub-national governments do not need to have their own statistics offices, instead being able to rely on the national agency. In the Argentine case, the different provinces had to generate their own statistics, building teams from scratch, training them, and providing them with materials needed for the work. These resources could have been used for other purposes, had the national statistics been credible.
Obviously, it also hindered management since governing with unreliable data impedes good decision making. In this context, it negated the possibility of generating evidence-based public policies.
As of 2015, the INDEC began its reconstruction process. Its reputation as a reliable source of information has returned to its former glory, but it remains unclear what effect those years of government intervention will have on the institutionality of public statistics in Argentina.
“Big_Data_Prob” Flickr photo by KamiPhuc – Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).