* Polish stats office: Polish-German trade figures sound
* Discrepancy on imports due to items transiting Germany
By Marcin Goettig
WARSAW, 24 March (Reuters) - An apparent multi-billion euro discrepancy in Polish and German trade data merely reflects different treatment of exports and imports under international accounting rules, Poland's statistics office said on Thursday.
Markets were set on edge on Monday when an adviser to the Polish central bank governor said errors and omissions in Poland's 2010 balance of payments data amounting to 4 percent of gross domestic product could be due to underestimated imports.
The adviser, Miroslaw Gronicki, said Poland reported a 2 billion euro surplus in trade with Germany last year, while Germany reported a surplus of 12 billion. That left a 14-billion euro hole that could potentially be explained by Poland underestimating its imports.
German data later seen by Reuters revealed a difference of 11.7 billion euros compared with the Polish data.
Gronicki's comments spooked economists, who said that such a large gap could possibly reduce past growth figures, reveal wider-than-reported budget deficits, cause the current account gap to widen and potentially push public debt to above a 55 percent ceiling that would trigger severe budget cuts.
"Worries that Polish imports may be significantly revised upwards contributed to the zloty's undereperformance in the last few days," said Piotr Kalisz, chief economist at Citibank Handlowy in Warsaw.
But the Polish statistics office said the difference in what Berlin reported as exports to Poland and what Warsaw counted as imports from Germany derived from the fact that many of the goods had a different country of origin.
"Comparable data on foreign trade between Poland and Germany show a high degree of conformity," Ewa Adach-Stankiewicz, head of the trade and services department at the Polish statistics office, told Reuters in an e-mail.
CHINESE IMPORTS
She said both countries considered exports as all goods sent from either Poland or Germany to the other, but import figures were based on the country of origin rather than dispatch.
In this case, a large amount of Chinese goods which came to Poland via Germany counted as German exports to Poland but not as Polish imports from Germany.
"Foreign trade statistics in all EU countries must respect the methodology of the U.N. statistics department," she said.
"Data on imports are presented for the country of origin... while exports data are presented on the basis of destination country."
Among other research groups investigating the discrepancy, Danske Bank issued a report on the topic, saying a large upward revision in imports could have negative consequences for economic data and markets.
The statistics office's explanation also does not explain the 13.7 billion euro deficit in the "errors and omissions" section of the balance of payments data for 2010, which is larger than the deficit on the current account of 11.6 billion euros.
That balance of payments data falls under the responsibility of the central bank, which for many years has been trying to clarify the large "errors and omissions" category of the data.
Earlier this week central bank governor Marek Belka told Obserwatorfinansowy.pl website that the errors and omissions "keep us awake at night" and the bank is working to explain them. (Editing by Michael Winfrey and Stephen Nisbet)