Revision of Error Margins (point for decision) Mathieu Erzar 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

Aim and current situation General aim of the margins Detection of extraordinary growth rates between two consecutive years Verification of the credibility of the records with the concerned country Current situation Same margins applied for all datasets 100% change for Warnings 300% change for Errors 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

Definition of new margins Aims of the new “error margins” New error margins taking into account the specificity of the various datasets Reduction of the burden of the countries Methodology For the low absolute values: more tolerance (increase of the error margins threshold) For the high absolute values: decrease of the error margins threshold Focus on the most important problems “Warning thresholds” to be taken out 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

Example of application of the new margins proposed   Number of loaded ITUs YEAR COUNTRY A COUNTRY B Y-1 47 500 40 000 Y 66 200 70 000 Change 39% 75% Higher values (66 200 and 70 000) included in the interval [50 000;Max] Example of records provided by reporting countries A and B Extract of the table with the new margins (full table available on p.8 of the WG document 6) COUNTRY A Growth rate (39%) lower than 55% The threshold is not reached (no clarification needed from the country) 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

Example of application of the new margins proposed   Number of loaded ITUs YEAR COUNTRY A COUNTRY B Y-1 47 500 40 000 Y 66 200 70 000 Change 39% 75% Higher values (66 200 and 70 000) included in the interval [50 000;Max] Example of records provided by reporting countries A and B Extract of the table with the new margins (full table available on p.8 of the WG document 6) COUNTRY B Growth rate (75%) is higher than 55% The threshold is reached (clarification needed from the country) 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

Summary & proposal The new margins will: Take into account the specificity of the datasets Focus on the main problems Reduce the burden of the countries Errors for Annexes A to E datasets and Alerts for Annex H datasets New approach beneficial for Eurostat and the countries Proposal: Replacement of warning and error thresholds (of 100% and 300%) by a new set of error (and alert) margins only (see new thresholds defined in WG doc. 6) 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6

The Member States are kindly requested to express their position on the new error margins settings proposed by Eurostat Thank you for your attention ! 2-3 April 2009 Meeting of the Working Group on Rail Transport Statistics Agenda point: 7.3 Doc Rail-2009-6