The fifth meeting of the European Statistical Forum (ESF) took place on 17 November in Luxembourg. It was attended by Directors-General of the National Statistical Institutes and by Directors of Statistics of the National Central Banks. The meeting was co-chaired by the Acting Director-General of Eurostat, Mariana Kotzeva, and by the Director General of the European Central Bank's Statistics DG, Aurel Schubert.

The first part of the meeting included several presentations on areas in which the ESS and the ESCB work jointly, such as implementation of the MoU on MIP statistics, Foreign Direct Investment, Commercial Property Price Indicators, and statistics on Income, Consumption and Wealth and Globalisation.

The second part of the meeting was fully revamped this year and included a set of three presentations under the theme of the "post-truth" era's impact on the credibility of statistics (e.g. Communication strategy in times of fake news and Elusive truth – official statistics and public perceptions).

The special guest of the ESF meeting was Mr Thomas Buch-Andersen, a Danish journalist. He gave a presentation with the Shakespearean title "There is something beautiful in the stats of Denmark", about a successful Danish fact-checking TV programme “Detektor”.

The next ESF meeting takes place in Frankfurt on 11 December 2018.

The European Statistical Forum (ESF) was created in 2013 as a governance body in the relations between the European Statistical System (ESS) and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The Forum was created by the Memorandum of Understanding for the cooperation between members of the ESS and ESCB, signed on 24 April 2013, which was a starting point for mutual trust building.

The Forum met for the first time in November 2013. The second ESF meeting is scheduled to take place on 17 September 2014 in Bratislava.

On the agenda, discussions on Balance of payment statistics, globalisation indicators, income consumption and wealth statistics, among other topics.