Do Countries falsify Economic Data Strategically? Some Evidence That They Do

Tomasz Michalski and Gilles Stoltz

DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade

Abstract: We find evidence supporting the hypothesis that countries at times misreport their economic data in a strategic manner. Among those suspected are countries with fixed exchange rate regimes, high negative net foreign asset positions or negative current account balances, which corroborates the intuition developed with a simple economic model. We also find that countries with bad institutional quality rankings and those in Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America release economic data of questionable veracity. Our evidence calls for models with public signals to consider strategic misinformation and for establishing independent statistical agencies to assure the delivery of high quality economic data.

Keywords: capital flows; public information provision; misinformation; Benford's law; transparency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 F31 F32 F33 F34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 Pages
Date: 2010-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://degit.sam.sdu.dk/papers/degit_15/c015_018.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to degit.sam.sdu.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Countries Falsify Economic Data Strategically? Some Evidence that They Do (2013)
Working Paper: Do countries falsify economic date strategically? Some evidence that they do (2010)
Working Paper: Do countries falsify economic data strategically? Some evidence that they do (2010)
Working Paper: Do countries falsify economic data strategically? Some evidence that they do (2010)
Working Paper: Do countries falsify economic date strategically? Some evidence that they do (2010)
Working Paper: Do countries falsify economic date strategically? Some evidence that they do (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:deg:conpap:c015_018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan Pedersen ().