This is why in many countries the governments have tried to make the agents amenable to public’s requirements through the implementation of such devices as “people’s charters”. The result is the production of the agent remaining at low quality, becoming unreliable and failing to satisfy the users. The same fate has befallen the governmental organisations that produce and supply statistics to the public free of charge. Many have witnessed the increasing occurrence of the “misuse of statistics” by those who produce and supply statistics to the market. The Google search machine has documented some 2.5 million cases of the misuse of statistics from around the world. The misuse of statistics Why does the production of statistics become unreliable? There are many pitfalls to which statisticians fall when they produce statistics. Wikipedia, the cyber-encyclopaedia, has listed out these errors often committed by statisticians. According to Wikipedia, “a misuse of statistics occurs when a statistical argument asserts a falsehood”. It could be due to both accidental and purposeful. When it is purposeful, it is always perpetrated in order to gain an undue benefit to the perpetrator. The danger with the wrongful use of statistics is the creation of a statistical fallacy that would be costly to those who make use of the deliberately doctored statistics. Such statistics are damaging to the quest of knowledge in the sense that, once they are rooted in the minds of the people, it would take years to correct the falsehood that it would have created in the society.
That is the background to the common estimate that over a longer period the Swedish economy can now sustain an average annual growth rate of between 2% and 2.5%. There are certainly some encouraging signs in Sweden in the form of many new companies and young entrepreneurs in the new information technology. And people in Sweden rank high as Internet users. But this has not shown up in the macroeconomic statistics to such an extent that there would be grounds for supposing that the potential growth rate has moved up towards the US level. A good indicator of whether conditions are in place for stronger productivity growth in the future is the existence of a sufficiently high rate of economic transformation, for instance in the form of increased investment and a rapidly growing capital stock. There are few signs of this in the Swedish economy, at least if one compares the 1990s with the 1980s. BIS Review 6/2000  2  Neither do other countries in Europe yet show any widespread signs of what is called the new economy. One reason may be that Europe is still in an earlier cyclical phase than the United States, so that investment in new directions has not yet taken off. Given this optimistic interpretation, it should be just a matter of time before the positive effects also materialise in Europe.