The GRTU, Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises, yesterday picked holes in a statement by the National Statistics Office on 31 January, issued in reply to a news conference the GRTU had given about the gross domestic product expansion for the third quarter of 2007.
It expressed satisfaction that the NSO would be publishing the deflators of the GDP sectors but could not understand why the deflators were to be published only for the fourth quarter of 2007.
The GRTU said that once the GDP deflators were verified and audited by Eurostat there should be no reason to prevent publication for every quarter of 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. It said the Statistics Authority should publish them if only in the name of the transparency and accountability the NSO and the authority should have.
The authority, the GRTU added, should verify why the domestic consumption deflator for the third quarter of 2007 was negative (-1.86 per cent) while the retail price index was showing positive inflation (1.28 per cent), and the harmonised index of consumer prices was also showing positive inflation (0.42 per cent).
The GRTU said it would like to verify if domestic consumption prices had truly gone down in the third quarter of 2007. The NSO had not explained this, it said.
This was the crucial point because, the GRTU said, it was arguing that the real expansion of domestic consumption was 3.64 per cent, while GDP real expansion in the third quarter was 1.94 per cent, and not 4.14 per cent as the NSO had said.
The GRTU noted that the imports deflator was showing that the prices of imported products, objects and services had increased by 0.7722 per cent in the third quarter of 2007. If global domestic consumption prices had truly gone down by 1.86 per cent, this meant that the prices of products, objects and services supplied in Malta had gone down drastically.
This was something very serious for the GRTU and its members, the GRTU said. This was why it was asking for an official explanation about this from the Statistics Authority as the regulator of the NSO. It was insisting on knowing by how much the prices had gone down of products, objects and services supplied in Malta in the third quarter of 2007, if this was true.
It added it was also asking for an explanation from the authority about why the inflation of the domestic consumption deflator had always followed closely the inflation both of the retail price index and of the harmonised index of consumer prices in each quarter of 2005 and 2006 and in the first quarter of 2007, while there were huge divergencies in the second quarter (five times as much of what was normal previously) and in the third quarter (seven and a half times as much of what was normal previously) of 2007. These divergencies showed that something strange had happened in the domestic consumption deflator in these two quarters of 2007.
The GRTU asked for the formal resignation of Reno Camilleri from chairman of the authority while he remained chief officer at the NSO. He should resign as chairman so someone else would take his place who would formally verify these points. The GRTU said it did not believe Mr Camilleri could correctly verify these points while he remained chief officer at the NSO.
It added it was writing to the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development to ask the Statistics Authority under a new chairman to give a full explanation for the points it was making.