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The official statistics framework is based on internationally agreed standards, taking into account the core principles of impartiality, objectivity, professional independence, cost effectiveness, statistical confidentiality, minimisation of the reporting burden and high output quality. Since the latest 2007 global economic crisis, a growing demand for more, better and timelier data under limited resources for compilers and reporting agents has been observed. The concept of experimental statistics becomes more relevant, despite the lower quality in terms of coverage, data sources and harmonised definitions. The main aim of this paper is to present the methodological development of the residential property price index in Croatia from experimental to official statistics, as well as to show corresponding changes in time, which occurred due to the changes in methodological framework, institutional responsibility for compilation, coverage and data sources. A general conclusion of the paper is that publication of non-harmonized experimental statistics results, together with explanatory metadata, is better from the point of view of users than having nothing produced by official statistics.

Surveillance of government deficit and debt data is a very important issue from the point of view of national policy makers, as well as international financial and statistical organizations. Deficit and debt developments in EU member states has been regularly (twice a year) monitored by Eurostat, which collects and publishes so called excessive deficit procedure (EDP) statistics on government deficit and debt. The European Commission uses the EDP statistics to assess whether EU Member States' government deficits and debt levels comply with the relevant EU legislation (according to the Maastricht Treaty criteria, government deficit should be less or equal to 3% and government debt less or equal to 60%) of GDP. Deficit and debt data are published mostly in relative terms, i.e. compared with the nominal GDP and compiled according to the ESA2010 methodology. In simplified theory, annual government deficit/surplus should be equal to change in the level of government debt at the end of the actual year and at the end of the previous year. In reality, this is not true due to the impact of the stock-flow adjustments (SFA), which explains the difference between the change in government debt and the government deficit/surplus for a given year. Main aim of this paper is to identify the main factors contributing the changes in government debt other than deficit/surplus (SFA) in Croatia during the period 2010-2017. Those factors are divided into three main categories: net acquisition of financial assets (further broken down by financial instruments), adjustments (for coverage, valuation and exchange rate changes) and statistical discrepancies (reflects differences arising from the use of various data sources). Second, not less important aim of paper is to identify size and impact of the particular SFA factors on changes in debt level during the observed period in Croatia, and based on results obtained, short recommendations for Croatian policymakers will be outlined.

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