BRUSSELS (MNI) – The European Union’s statistical office, Eurostat,
today unveiled a new “scoreboard,” intended to track the performances of
EU countries on a series of indicators considered vital to maintaining
financial stability.

The scoreboard goes hand in hand with the European Commission’s new
“macroeconomic imbalance procedure (MIP),” intended to detect danger
signs that could presage harmful financial developments in the future.
The Commission today said it had identified 12 EU countries with
potentially harmful macroeconomic imbalances that warrant further
examination. Among those cited are France, Italy, Spain and the United
Kingdom.

Eventually, the MIP would function in a similar fashion to the
Commission’s excessive deficit procedure: countries would be warned of
risky imbalances, the Commission would issue policy recommendations and
the countries cited would be required to correct the situation within a
specified timeframe or be subjected to possible financial penalties.

The scoreboard, which will be updated as new data become available,
can be found at the folling weblink:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal

/page/portal/excessive_imbalance_procedure/imbalance_scoreboard.

The following is a verbatim text from Eurostat explaining the new
scoreboard and the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure:

“Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, publishes
for the first time today the indicators of the Macroeconomic Imbalance
Procedure (MIP) Scoreboard. The Scoreboard indicators1 provide the
statistical support to the Commission’s Alert Mechanism Report. The
headline indicators are available on a dedicated section of the Eurostat
website, which will be regularly updated as the underlying data become
available. For Walter Radermacher, Director General of Eurostat, ‘this
is a confirmation of Eurostat’s role as the leading provider of high
quality European statistics. For the Commission, it is very important
that the statistical information used in the Alert Mechanism is compiled
according to the principles of the European Statistics Code of Practice
of the European Statistical System. The Code ensures the relevance,
comparability and quality of the data, produced by independent
statistical institutions.’

The MIP is part of the six legislative proposals on economic
governance adopted by the European Parliament and Council in November
20114. The MIP Scoreboard provides the basis for the economic reading of
potential imbalances. The Commission will annually identify in its Alert
Mechanism Report the cases for which more in-depth analyses are
required.

The initial Scoreboard consists of ten economic, financial and
structural indicators relevant for the early detection of emerging
macroeconomic imbalances at Member State level. To assess internal
imbalances, the Scoreboard includes indicators on government and private
debt, private credit flow, house prices and unemployment. To assess
external imbalances, the indicators cover the current account balance,
net investment positions, real effective exchange rates, share of world
exports and nominal unit labour cost (see definitions in annex).
Eurostat is the main provider of data for these indicators. Some data
are also provided by the Commission’s Directorate General for Economic
and Financial Affairs, the European Central Bank and the IMF.”

–Paris newsroom, +331-42-71-55-40; bwolfson@marketnews.com

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