A month later, the considered view of the IMF is much more nuanced. Here are the five things you need to know about the fund’s retreat.

Well, after a root around Eurostat’s website, the UK’s ONS methodology pages and some academic articles, I am really excited. The bottom line for people with better things to do is that Eurostat reckons GDP in most EU countries will also go up by about 2 to 3 per cent. The amount depends on the quantity of R&D expenditure carried out (good for Germany, Sweden and Finland, bad for Greece) and amount of military kit purchased every year (good for France and the UK). With some exceptions, every EU country has to put in place the new European System of Accounts by September 2014. But it gets even more interesting.

The preliminary estimate of gross domestic product rose 0.3 per cent in the first quarter. As my column today argued, we should not pay much attention to this figure, since the cash estimates of GDP, which come later, are more relevant to the economy’s predicament. But there are some implications of this positive surprise and I list them here in order of importance.

You can have a long and reasonable argument on whether the raid, euphemistically called a “cash management operation”, is a good idea. But I argued a few days later that the treatment of an internal public sector transfer of money as government revenue in the headline figures was a poor decision by the Office for National Statistics. There was no world in which the underlying public finances had been improved by the move, I argued.

As a journalist I was appalled that Britain’s independent statistical authority was setting out a legalistic argument for an economic question and for a set of statistics that were not governed by international conventions. I felt the statistics for borrowing and debt could not be trusted any more.

As a member of the public, I wrote to the chairman of the UK Statistical Authority, the statistics watchdog, to ask for a review of the ONS decision (email reproduced below). Today, I received a reply from Andrew Dilnot, the UKSA chairman (also reproduced). I am delighted to say the UKSA thinks I raised important points and has set up a short review.

Developing countries should not be tempted to stimulate their economies this year in the face of weak growth, the World Bank warned on Wednesday even though the world faces another challenging year.

In forecasts that suggest 2013 will see only marginally stronger growth than last year, the Bank recommends that poor and middle-income countries concentrate on fundamental drivers of prosperity rather than attempt a quick fix.

(People who want the real gory detail should look at professor Erwin Diewert’s report)

The first thing to note is that contrary to well-intentioned explainers such as this one from the BBC, or the otherwise-rather-good editorial in today’s Times newspaper, the problem in the calculation of the RPI is not to do with the difference between geometric averages and arithmetic averages. It is really about the deficiencies of one particular arithmetic average, the Carli index.

Don’t just believe me, play with this spreadsheet, (Price indices). I will also help you to use it with a few worked examples. The worked examples are extremes, but they serve to show the important biases of different ways of calculating inflation.

At the time, I published an article and a technical blog in the FT, casting some doubt on the robustness of the IMF’s work. It also caused a minor stir. I included all the data so people could play around with the numbers themselves if they wished.

In December, another part of the IMF published a working paper using different methodology, which found much smaller multipliers. It is not the first time that different parts of the fund disagree. It will not be the last.

What does the new working paper say and what conclusions should we draw?

Today, I gave evidence on the communication of statistics to the Public Administration Select Committee and to test whether the website had improved materially I thought I would pick a relevant question, to which I wanted to find an answer as a member of the public and as an expert user of the website. The question was: Is unemployment higher or lower now than in 1995?

This is the website journey (for lay and expert users) I described in the Committee, which I think is accurate and depressing. I don’t think a non-expert could find the interesting answer (at the bottom of the post) and an expert has to take a long journey to get there. The result should be immediate on clicking on an unemployment link on the homepage or on typing in the relevant 4-digit code for experts. Again, the ONS website – aaaargh.

Member of the public