In late June, Eurostat published statistics on the proportion of young people living at home in different EU countries.
However, the Swedish data underlying the compilation was incorrect.
The error lies with SCB, says Thomas Helgeson at the statistics agency.
The figures – which showed that the proportion of young people between 18 and 34 in Sweden living at home increased from 12.5 to 21.9 percent between 2022 and 2023 – received widespread coverage via the international news agency Bloomberg. Even TT published the figures in a news article that received widespread coverage among Swedish media.
Now, Statistics Sweden (SCB), which regularly delivers data on Sweden's population to Eurostat, announces that they have made an error in a data delivery, which makes the statistics misleading.
The error lies with SCB, not Eurostat, says Thomas Helgeson, head of the living conditions and democracy section at SCB.
According to Helgeson, it appears that the actual proportion of young people living at home in 2022 was around 20 percent, which would mean that the change between 2022 and 2023 is marginal. SCB, however, needs to perform a new data run to obtain an exact figure, which may take one or two weeks.
Helgeson emphasizes that it is regrettable when errors are discovered afterwards.
We primarily check our own publications. Then it's the case that Eurostat, as well as OECD and others, publish figures based on SCB's data. We can't check everything, but we check as much as we can.
