When numbers don’t add up

Statistics Korea faces credibility crisis over watered-down reports

By Kim Tong-hyung

Numbers don’t lie, but they can be cut and sewn to tell half-truths. Displaying a mastery of this skill has been Statistics Korea, which continues to produce technically accurate but misleading reports that appear desperately aimed at sugarcoating the blizzard of bad data facing the country’s economy.

Journalists have learned to treat the agency’s announcements like school reports brought home by children: what’s on top is often an attempt at distracting attention from the more uncomfortable findings beneath it.

Statistics Korea’s press release on family finances last week provided the latest example of its tendency to misrepresent. The report, based on full-year data for 2011, was apparently authored to look as nondescript as possible, headlined by the nominal increase in household income and consumption and eased erosion of the Gini coefficient, a loose measure of wealth concentration.

However, the real story was to be found in a 35-page spreadsheet the agency additionally attached, which was scattered with gruesome facts that confirmed wealth inequality has accelerated at an alarming pace last year. This obviously is nothing to yawn at, especially when there are growing fears over families’ ability to cope with the inexorable rise in food and energy bills.

The richest 20 percent of families earned 5.73 times more in disposable income than the poorest 20 percent and nearly eight times more when excluding the effect of welfare systems. The average surplus income, or disposable income minus outlays, fell 5.6 percent among the poorest 20 percent of families but increased a staggering 23.3 percent among the richest 20 percent.

Beat reporters, or at least yours truly, would have preferred Statistics Korea addressing these facts in the text of its main press release, instead of throwing them in a mumbo-jumbo of raw data in green lines and boxes.

When asked whether the findings confirm that the struggles of lower-income earners are beginning to pose a serious threat to the country’s financial stability, a Statistics Korea official incredulously replied, ``we haven’t analyzed that yet.’’

Statistics Korea has also been taking flak for the way it gauges the health of the job market as its figures have been used by policymakers who claim to have unemployment under control.

In issuing a denial over the severity of Korea’s unemployment problem last month, Strategy and Finance Minister Bahk Jae-wan pointed to Statistics Korea’s better-than-expected job figures for 2011 and declared the country was navigating its way out of the purgatory that is jobless growth.

``Despite the heightened uncertainty surrounding the economy from inside and out, the recovery in the job market has been consistent. The number of jobs created in 2011 greatly exceeded expectations and government objectives,’’ Bahk said in a meeting with economic policymakers.