The main role of the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) is to foster the success of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU. To this end, it carries out a wide range of macroeconomic analytical tasks which require appropriate and high quality economic and statistical indicators.
Most of these analytical tasks are based on published official data provided by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union. They are established in close cooperation with the National Statistical Institutes of EU Member States.
However, for monetary and financial statistics our partners are the European
Central Bank together with the European System of Central Banks as major
supplier. For non-EU countries, international organisations such as the UN, the
IMF and the OECD provide the necessary statistics.
Basically, DG ECFIN is a primary user rather than a producer of macroeconomic
statistics. But the abundance of official statistics available mean that data
relevant to DG ECFIN's tasks must be selected, organised, transformed and
adapted depending on the task to be carried out.
DG ECFIN also manages a network of national institutes to conduct a harmonised EU programme of business and consumer tendency surveys. This is the only domain for which DG ECFIN is both the user and the provider of the data.
This process of filtering and tailoring statistics has created a number of
statistical databases and substantial statistical documents for internal use in
DG ECFIN. They have become indispensable working tools.
As DG ECFIN's analyses and reports are of public interest, they are as a rule
published on our website. DG ECFIN’s policy on underlying statistical data used
in analyses and reports is to make the most important statistical products
accessible to the public. This policy allows to see the statistical bases and
verify the numbers. It also encourages our users and readers to communicate
with DG ECFIN.
Generally, updates depend on the availability of fresh data. However, in
several cases they follow the time schedule of DG ECFIN's internal working
procedures. This applies particularly to the AMECO database and related
government data. They are updated twice a year on the occasion of the spring
and autumn forecasts in early May and early November. Between the two
forecasting exercises the data remains unchanged.