> “There used to be certain aspects in life that you could just rely on, and the fact that official statistics are published on time was one of them — not any more,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist of Commerzbank, adding that the suspended data was also closely watched by monetary policymakers and investors.

> But a series of glitches, data issues and IT delays meant Destatis has been unable to publish retail sales and other services data for four months.

> The Wiesbaden-based authority, which was established in 1948, said the outages had been caused by IT issues and a complex methodological change in EU business statistics in a bid to boost accuracy.