CHILE’S reputation as a place where official statistics can be trusted has taken a bit of a battering of late. Last year the reliability of the country’s poverty survey, the CASEN, was called into doubt. Now it’s the turn of the census and inflation figures.
The 2012 census concluded that the population of Chile was 16,634,603. The National Statistics Institute (INE) said it knew this with some certainty because it had surveyed almost all of them, visiting 98.3% of households over four months. The government hailed the census as the most thorough in Chile’s history.
But on April 26th, a senior INE advisor, Mariana Alcérreca, said that the number of people surveyed was only 15.8m, or 95% of the population. She said the institute’s director Francisco Labbé massaged the figure upwards to 16.6m to make they census look more comprehensive. She also claimed that there were other irregularities in the way the census was conducted. Within hours, Mr Labbé—who says the accusations against him are politically motivated "lies"—had resigned.
The INE’s inflation data has also been questioned. Statisticians advised Mr Labbé to change the way it was calculated, but he refused. On April 17th the heads of 11 INE departments sent him a letter expressing their unease about both the census and the price data.
Bci, a Chilean bank, warned its clients that Chile’s inflation figures were less reliable than those of Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. The bank said inflation was probably around 2.5% last year—not the 1.5% of official lore. Morgan Stanley has also questioned the data.
The implications are enormous. Chile’s central bank has held its benchmark interest-rate steady at 5% for the past 15 months. Would it have done so if inflation were a percentage point higher? Many Chileans have inflation-linked investments. They may feel their money should have been earning more for them than it has.
