Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 8 – People have long distrusted statistics – Mark Twain’s observation
that “there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics’ is a commonplace – but over
the last two years and especially over the last two weeks, Russians have come no
longer to believe them at all if they are issued by the state’s statistical
arm, Rosstat, Nezavisimaya gazeta
says.
Like
the Soviet regime before it, the editors say in a lead article, the Russian
government has helped to create this problem, often putting out falsified
information to make themselves look good and, most recently, putting Rosstat directly
under the economic development ministry, which has clear interests in falsification
(ng.ru/editorial/2019-02-07/2_7502_red.html).
Vladimir Putin’s April 2017 decision
to put it there rather than directly under the prime minister as it had been is
often cited in the expert community as creating the kind of conflict of
interest that guarantees problems: it means that the ministry responsible for
growth controls the agency that tells the world whether there has been any.
The situation got worse, the editors
say, when Rosstat’s longtime head, Aleksandr Surinov, was replaced in December
by a young technocrat, Pavel Malkov, who came from the ranks of that
ministry. To no one’s surprise, the new
man reported growth that the older experts had not seen – and thereby killed
any reason to believe Rosstat ever again.
“The restoration of trust requires
public control over Rosstat’s work,” Nezavisimaya
gazeta says. Handing it back to the
prime minister’s office is not enough. A better approach could be to make it an
independent agency like the Accounting Chamber. Other countries work hard to
keep their statisticians honest and credible; Russia should do no less.
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