The abrupt changes in the labor market from month to month, with the unemployment rate fluctuating between June and July – without the ability to document these changes – ultimately forced the Hellenic Statistical Authority to postpone the publication of the data.
It was eventually announced on Monday that in June the rate increased to 9% from 7.9% in May.
A month later, in July, unemployment fell to 8%, also a “strange” decrease of an entire percentage point.
In the meantime, the May rate had been seasonally adjusted, reaching 8.5%.
All this while the data for the second quarter of the year showed that the unemployment rate is on a steady downward trend, resulting in the quarter closing at 8.6%.
This picture of continuous revisions from month to month, as well as significant deviations between monthly and quarterly data, was not lost on Eurostat.
In fact, in an exercise to monitor the quality of data concerning the monthly unemployment rate of the member-states, the assessment of Greece with regard to the data was negative.
Consequently, the country is ranked among those that fall outside the limits of both EU measures, namely volatility and revisions.
Specifically, for the “frequency of double large reversals” index, Greece exceeds the 5% limit set by the regulation.
This means in practice that in the series of seasonally adjusted data, too many abrupt changes are observed in consecutive months, which is considered an unrealistic pattern.