In 1937 Russia was conducting a census intended to prove that Stalin’s “progressive” economic policies led to the population growth. The government put a brilliant Russian statistician Olimpiy Kvitkin, who studied mathematics and statistics at Sorbonne, in charge of the census bureau. The findings were unexpected. Instead of growing, Russian population had contracted by 6 million in three years.
Kvitkin was accused of conspiring with the West and shot by a firing squad, but today’s historians have proven that his numbers were correct. The Russian population had declined, due to repressions and confiscation of grain from farmers followed by major famine.
On June 8, that story reverberated among economists and human rights activists after the Supreme Court of Greece upheld a two-year sentence for a prominent statistician who had revealed unfavorable economic data. In 2010, following the financial crisis of 2007-2009, Greece put Andreas Georgiou in charge of the newly created Hellenic Statistical Authority, ELSTAT, responsible for computing government’s debt and budget deficit.
Georgiou had attended high school in Athens, received his B.A. in Economics (with Summa Cum Laude) from Amherst College, and got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Michigan, where he studied monetary theory and international trade. Before accepting the position as president of ELSTAT he had been Deputy Division Chief in the Statistics Department of the International Monetary Fund, where he worked for 21 years.
Under Georgiou’s leadership, ELSTAT found that that the government’s budget deficit was 15.4 percent of GDP, not the 6 to 8 percent that had been reported by Greece before 2010, nor the revised figure of 13.6 percent, that the government of George Papandreou had put forward under European pressure. With Georgiou in charge, the European Statistical Agency, Eurostat, would validate all 14 consecutive semi-annual reviews submitted by ELSTAT. On the contrary, in the five years preceding Georgiou’s appointment as head of Greece’s statistical agency, Eurostat refused to certify deficit and debt statistics reported by Greece.
In 2015, Greek authorities forced Georgiou to resign. They never took any legal action against those responsible for misreporting statistical data prior to 2010. Instead, in 2011, they accused Georgiou of inflating the deficit figures, with official charges against him filed in 2013. The charges were dismissed by the Appeals Court Council in 2015, largely due to the unanimous assent among European and U.S. statistical agencies that the data reported by ELSTAT were beyond doubt and that they had been collected and released in accordance with the European Statistics Code of Practice.
In 2016 the Supreme Court of Greece threw out the decision in Georgiou’s favor. Soon thereafter, government prosecutors brought new charges against him carrying a possible life sentence. They ranged from “harming national interests” to costing the country €190 billion and creating panic that led to Greece’s economic downfall and bailouts by the IMF and European Union in 2010, 2012, and 2015.
In 2017, the lower court issued a suspended 2-year sentence to Georgiou, finding him guilty of not consulting the ELSTAT board before transmitting the deficit figures to Eurostat in 2010. The Appeals Court dismissed the charges again, but government prosecutors went back to the Supreme Court, which reinstated the conviction.
Georgiou is a legend among economists and statisticians for staying honest to the profession amid enormous pressure from the government. Dozens of professional organizations of statisticians and countless individuals, including nine Nobel laureates in economics, defended Georgiou against the “triple-jeopardy” prosecution in Greece. The American Statistical Association issued a statement denouncing the decision of the Supreme Court and calling upon Greece to end prosecution of Georgiou for good.
On May 26, Georgiou gave a speech at his alma mater, Amherst College. The effort by Greece to convince the public that it was Georgiou’s reporting of economic data that destroyed Greek economy, and not the failed economic policies of the government, goes on. Legal costs and worries about the future have taken an enormous toll on Georgiou’s family. They live in Maryland, worried about extradition and afraid of physical violence in case they have to return to Greece. Meanwhile the trust in the economic data reported by Greece is at the lowest level ever, in large part because of what happened to Andreas Georgiou.
Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and Co-Chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.
