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Bowles welcomed the European Parliament's adoption of the guidelines in today's session, saying national accounts were the "cornerstone of all macro-economic statistics". "In the budgetary framework of the six pack", Bowles said, in reference to the EU budget deficit rules renegotiated in the wake of the eurozone crisis, "it was agreed that there should be better reporting of public sector liabilities and an end to off-balance-sheet accounting for governments, and it takes good statistics to track that. Unfortunately, four large Member States were reluctant to have mandatory transmission of pension liabilities data, which the Parliament saw as a blatant attempt to keep potentially embarrassing information out of the public domain and away from calculations."
France, Germany, Italy and Portugal had previously opposed greater disclosure, but the MEP said several rounds of negotiation had seen agreement reached.
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