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Price Index Row Costs Statistician Her Job, Yet Again

2 May 2016 822 views No Comment

Graciela Bevacqua says she was sacked in a dispute over her proposed development schedule

“This has to do with my refusal to create a new consumer price index in two months.”

Things had been looking up for Graciela Bevacqua, the former head of Argentina’s official consumer price index (CPI). Having been dismissed from her job in 2007 for refusing to bend to government pressure to tweak the CPI so as to report a low rate of inflation, she found herself back working for the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) after elections late last year swept a new government to power. Hearing the news in early February, we emailed Bevacqua a handful of questions about her new role and how it felt to be back working for INDEC as technical director. She agreed to the interview, seemingly enthusiastic at the promise of a fresh start for the country’s statistical system. Headlines such as “Fishy Figures” from The Economist in September 2014 give some indication of the skepticism with which Argentina’s inflation estimates have been viewed in recent years. A few days later, however, Bevacqua emailed us back: “Sorry to let you know that [they] have separated me from the post of technical director on Monday 15 February,” she wrote. “This has to do with my refusal to create a new consumer price index in two months.” Bevacqua described returning to INDEC to find the CPI “destroyed” by political interference. The decision was taken to redevelop the index from scratch, and she believed she had the government’s backing for this task. “I estimated it would take approximately eight months. The resulting system would have some limitations,” she said, “but it would be a serious and credible measure.”

Graciela Bevacqua was interviewed by Alicia Carriquiry in the December 2012 issue of Significance. Read the article online for free.

On 14 January, an INDEC press release explained how CPI data from the Buenos Aires department of statistics and the San Luis provincial bureau of statistics would provide an alternative measure of the country’s inflation rate while development work continued. At the time, INDEC director Jorge Todesca spoke of “a sense of urgency” in having INDEC start generating its own data, but that the agency was committed to a “phased rebuild” of all statistical outputs during 2016. However, Bevacqua said that when orders came to deliver a new consumer price index in two months, she insisted it would not be “credible” to do so, after which she was removed from her post—a post for which she had given up her job only months before. According to a Bloomberg report, Todesca has since said that the new price index would be ready by the end of the second quarter. Bevacqua, meanwhile, has expressed concern for what this latest development means for her country and the government’s commitment to restoring public trust in statistics—though the immediate task in front of her is to seek work. She will also be hoping for a swift and positive end to a criminal case that has hung over her since 2011. After she was ousted from INDEC in 2007, Bevacqua began producing her own independent measure of inflation. This action, however, led to criminal and civil charges being brought against her by the Argentine government. The two civil charges were cancelled between 2014 and 2015, but the criminal charge remains. The court had made a ruling in Bevacqua’s favor last summer (see Significance, October 2015, Page 3), but that ruling has since been appealed. And to think things had been looking up for Graciela Bevacqua.

    Editor’s Note: This originally appeared in the April 2016 issue of Significance magazine and is published here with permission.

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