One of the distinguishing features of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) has been punctuality in the schedule. Since the arrival of President Gustavo Petro’s team, however, some officials at the statistical center have reported slight modifications and postponements that are worrying. Regarding the annual monetary poverty survey, which for a decade was published between March and April, the delay is now two months. Multiple voices from district institutions or non-governmental organizations have raised an alert about a situation that affects the technical work agenda and undermines the prestige of the state agency.
The work of the Secretary of Social Integration of the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, Roberto Angulo, has been one of those affected by the uncertain delay in monetary poverty rates from last year. “It is very delicate. All the Development Plans of the capital cities sized their social spending efforts and monetary transfers without the latest figure for 2023,” explains the person who was part of the DANE panel of external experts for poverty issues. The making of these figures publicly available responds to international guidelines, from entities such as the UN or the OECD, to guarantee methodological neutrality and corner political pressures.
Sources close to the state statistical center point out a certain laxity in compliance with these rules. A slight change in the time of publication of data such as the Gross Domestic Product, to cite an example, can mean ruin or fortune for hundreds of investors pending the country’s growth and its next stock market movements.
Hector Maldonado, director of DANE between 2007 and 2010, recalls that about 20 years ago, inflation statistics were leaked to the public an hour earlier than stipulated. “It seems that a stockbrokerage firm made significant profits from this error,” he says. And to measure the risks involved in not complying with the guidelines, he adds: “The performance or valuation of some companies is based, for example, on the latest CPI data and depending on the time of publication there is a variation. In such a way that non-compliance with the data even has legal repercussions.”
The date for the release of the monetary poverty survey, on which the design of the country’s social policies largely depends, is not yet listed in the official calendar published on the DANE website. For Maldonado, the problem “could be communication” and he recalls that this is data that is extracted “from household surveys, so, in theory, there should be no problem in disseminating it.”
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DANE assured this newspaper that the “dates may vary” and that this statistical series was presented last year in September. But Roberto Angulo disagrees and clarifies that, in that case and as has happened historically, any deviation or methodological revision in the schedule has been accompanied by a clear warning.
“If DANE has had any difficulty with the measurement, the expert committee should maintain communication about it. We as data users should know this because all this can be very expensive,” Angulo continues. Maldonado agrees, and emphasizes that any update must be scrupulously explained: “These things generate concern. Why are they delayed? What’s going on? It is the same as when, in other administrations, the data have been presented by the Minister of Finance or the president and not the director of DANE. “Those things have to be taken care of.”
Natalia Galvis, a social policy consultant and researcher at the University of Manchester, complains about the deterioration in the production of statistics. She assures that in the case of the multidimensional poverty report, a scale complementary to the monetary poverty series, it was presented incomplete at a press conference held on April 19. Half a month later she adjusted the technical bulletin: “This is not new. The corrections they gave, in any case, lacked processing such as crossings with gender, crossings with an Afro population, or indigenous population, which were always delivered with the first scheduled date.”
The sum of technical deficiencies leads Galvis to the conclusion that there are very serious problems in guaranteeing the capture, processing and dissemination of information: “With what inputs is the Department of Social Prosperity structuring monetary transfers or subsidies if not Do we know how much a basic basket is? “This value must be precise and adjusted so that households can purchase their food and today we do not have it.”
To top it all off, the Presidency, which oversees DANE, has already hinted at some disagreements or disagreements with the organization’s management: “The census is only going to give us some data. If done well, these data will illuminate paths,” said Gustavo Petro in December during the presentation of the National Urban Census. And in mid-June, the financial daily Briefcase revealed a report in which the members of the committee of experts in charge of this work acknowledge that the development process began with flaws in its quality standards, methodological design or failures in data security.
In other samples, such as last year’s Quality of Life Survey, problems have arisen due to “modifications in the questionnaires,” recalls Natalia Galvis. However, sector sources point out, in defense of DANE, that the arrival of the new officials of the Petro Administration may be behind the problems of a very complex transition and joining process. Galvis not only supports this position, but also attributes the “deterioration” in the agency’s production to the arrival of the “new team.” “This is a matter of how qualified people are to take over one of the most technical entities in the State,” she says.
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