Eurostats - True or False?
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This is More or Less, the programme which finds light at the end of every statistical tunnel. We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this episode was broadcast on the World Service. Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Ruth Alexander, standing in for Tim Harford, who's currently trying to provide a one-man fiscal stimulus to the Portuguese beach economy. This week's programme is dedicated to Eurostats, those surprising statistics that have emerged from the Eurozone crisis. Which ones are true facts and which ones are slippery untruths? Here's an early clue. One Eurostat is so wrong we made this German laugh.
This story is so ridiculous.
Wesley Stevenson has been gathering some of the more startling statistical claims.
Yes, let's kick things off with those Greeks. A number of stories that fit the narrative of Greece being a basket case have been circulating, including this one.
There are more Porsche Cayennes registered in Greece than taxpayers declaring an income of €50,000 or more.
Well, these cars cost about 63,000 US dollars. So this is outrageous, if true.
Yeah, if true. The original claim was made by someone who you'd think would be a reliable source, an economic advisor to the former Prime Minister of Greece, a man called Professor Heracles Polymerkakis. But when I asked him, he said his remark was casual and he said it was based on what had been circulating in policy circles in Greece a few years back. And he didn't really have much to back it up. He told me the only hard fact he was aware of was that the per capita number of Porsches in the city of Larissa was one for every two and a half thousand, which was twice the amount of Porsche cans in the OECD countries worldwide.
But that doesn't back up his original assertion. Let's have a look at the facts here. In 2010, there were 311,428 people with declared incomes of more than 50,000 euros, or about 65,000 US dollars, who were paying tax in Greece.
Armed with this fact, I rang a really nice man called Lucas Kunze at Porsche, and this was his reaction to our numbers.
This story is so ridiculous.
LAUGHTER
So I asked him exactly how many Porsche Cayennes had been sold in Greece.
Since the start of the Cayenne in 2003, we sold around 1,500 Cayennes.
Which is not very much like 311,428. Not even 1%.
OK, so the Porsche Cayenne thing is wrong, but there was a broader implication here, that the Greeks don't pay tax.
Yeah, let's not tar everyone with the same brush. Of course, some Greeks pay tax. In fact, most do. But income tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are only 4.7%, which is the lowest in the Eurozone.
it would be good to think that this is just because Greece has rock-bottom tax rates, but it hasn't.
No, this is because for some people, what they actually earn and what they put on their tax forms are often quite different figures. As Horst Reichenbach, who's head of the EU task force offering technical help to the Greek government, said late last year, the amount of unpaid tax was estimated to be in the order of 60 billion euros or 80 billion US dollars.
Another automotive number that has made it into our Eurostats list was reported in one of the UK's broadsheet newspapers, the Daily Telegraph.
It said that Italian politicians... There are a staggering 30,000 of these executive cars and they cost the Italian taxpayer an estimated 2 billion euros a year.
Which is about 2.6 billion dollars. Now I really like this one because initially when I looked at this I found an even more staggering figure that suggested there were actually 629,000 of these cars.
Astonishing.
Yeah, and also not true, not even slightly true. And rumours of these figures have been swirling in the Italian press for a while, which prompted a review by the country's Ministry of Public Administration. Now, this found there were only 72,000 vehicles operated by central, regional and local governments.
And that's still more than the original report said.
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