STATISTICS AS INSTRUMENTS FOR PROSPEROUS, TRANSPARENT AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES (original) (raw)
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Statistical Journal of the IAOS, 2017
The paper aims to advance the discussion on the need for an international-global system of review and assessment of the implementation of the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (UNFP). It introduces an analytical argument of why official statistics and their quality is a "global public good", which needs to be managed appropriately at the global level so as to achieve a socially optimal outcome. While progress has been made in promoting the UNFP, the current system of monitoring their implementation and thus the quality of official statistics in individual countries is severely limited. This is because it is a system of voluntary self-assessment and self-monitoring and thus of limited reliability and usefulness. Moreover, the peer reviews that have taken place, although helpful, do not constitute the appropriate long term solution to the issue of optimally managing the global public good of official statistics. Instead, effective compliance monitoring of the implementation of the UNFP, through regular evaluation, verification, follow-up and published reports in the form of audits by an independent international institution, is essential for rigorous, timely and harmonized implementation of the UNFP. The paper also discusses aspects of setting up the proposed international institution and global system of monitoring.
A classification of types of use of official statistics
Statistical journal of the United Nations economic commission for Europe, 1991
In the article, a typology of the use of official statistics is proposed. Following an introduction to the subject, three dimensions of the use of official statistics are distinguished analytically: user categories, objectives oj use, and methods oj use. Each of the three dimensions is subdivided into four categories. The dimension user categories is subdivided in government, science, business, and the public; the dimension objectives oj use consists of knowledge, preparation for choice and action, evaluation of choice and action, and routinization of choice and action; and, finally, the dimension methods oj use is subdivided into consultation, monitoring and comparison, formal analysis of aggregate data, and formal analysis of individual-level data. Some of the more frequently occurring combinations are illustrated with the aid of examples from the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and the European Communities. After some introductory statements on priority setting (an evaluation of the significance and the cost of statistical projects), the relationship between type of use and priority setting is clarified. It is stated that, since a classification cannot automatically lead to a particular outcome in terms of priorities, the primary goals for a classification of types of use are relevancy and structure of information. The final paragraph discusses the likeliness of each of the 64 possible combinations; it is concluded that in the Dutch situation, for several reasons, almost half of these 64 combinations are more or less unlikely to occur.
The Commitment on Confidence in European Statistics (CoC) presented in the amended Regulation on European Statistics No 223/2015 can be seen not only as a means fostering the implementation of the European Statistics Code of Practice within the national statistical system but simultaneously also as an instrument paving the way to a whole-off production of national statistics under the fully-fledged coordination and leadership of the National Statistics Institute. The paper presents experience with the development of the CoC which has turned to be a complicated political process faced with many obstacles. The major one has been linked to the explanation why there is a need for such an instrument if official statistics enjoys a high reputation, and how to avoid a risk of undermining this reputation. Lessons from the Czech experience are offered.
Analysis of the future research needs for Official Statistics
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The Systems Approach to Official Statistics
Modern societies are complex and interdependent. We have become painfully aware of how environmental problems and financial crises with local origins may very quickly escalate into major global headaches with consequences affecting almost all aspects of our lives. In countries with great ambitions in so-called social engineering and the development of a welfare state, providing good living conditions for all citizens, there is a growing need for more and better official statistics as a basis for decision-making, planning, and evaluation. Businesses of all kinds also demand good official statistics, both on a national level and internationally, in order to be able to discover and exploit business opportunities. At the same time as there is an ever-growing demand for more and better, and maybe in particular more comprehensive and coherent official statistics, there are budget and time constraints forcing all producers of official statistics to economise on resources, especially in the very expensive production phase of data collection. Respondents also expect producers of official statistics to reduce the response burden and to harmonise data collection for official statistics with the natural business processes of the data providers, be they companies, organisations or citizens. This paper discusses how producers of official statistics could possibly meet all these challenges. There are alternatives to traditional data sources and data collection methods that may be exploited for statistical purposes, e.g., administrative registers and information systems, as well as data archives. The rapidly growing use of computerised information systems communicating via the Internet results, as a side-effect, in large volumes of "electronic footprints" that could possibly be exploited for statistical purposes -without harming the privacy of people or the confidentiality of business activities. In order to come to grips with growing problems associated with some traditional forms of statistics production, and to reap the potential benefits of the new possibilities, it is argued that we must adopt a more holistic approach, a systems approach, to official statistics. This paper elaborates such a holistic approach from a number of different perspectives.
The concept and commodity of official statistics
Statistical Journal of the IAOS, 2017
New threats and opportunities make it imperative to rethink the foundations of official statistics. This essay examines the industry's freedom of action. It identifies four ways of defining official statistics and considers their impact. It treats official statistics as a commodity, and the prospects of trading the commodity are examined relative to the concepts of public and private goods, merit goods and the common good, goods versus services, search, experience and credence goods, semi-finished and finished products. Product quality is discussed relative to the quality criteria of conformance to specifications and fitness for purposes, and the means to achieve quality are discussed as standardisation and customisation. The means determine the comparability of the statistics, and comparability determines the opportunities for perfect and monopolistic competition. The essay notes that the official statistics industry empowers those who compare, but also that it makes an exception for itself. Finally it is suggested that the biggest threat to the statistical agencies may not be the coming of competition but inability to rejuvenate the product set due to confinement in the state's bureaucracy.
Quality – key element of development of official statistics
2011
The assessment of the activity of National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) regarding compliance with the European Statistics Code of Practice reveals that NBS observes to a large extent the examined CoP principles. At the same time, there are problems related to the implementation of a performing system of quality management. One of the key problems is that of adequacy of resources, especially at human ones. The improvement of the structure and of the functionality of NBS, the larger access to administrative data, the implementation of the new IT concept, focused on re-designing and modernization of the statistical data production and dissemination architecture will contribute to the increase of the efficiency of statistical activity and the alleviation of resources constraints.
Statistics, Knowledge and Governance
2009
This paper reviews the role of statistical information in economic and political systems. It discusses how the production of knowledge in a decentralized way is fundamentally different from the traditional production of information in a centralized way by National Statistical Offices (NSOs). An empirical case study using data from the Eurobarometer Survey shows that trust in the statistical system is related to trust in governance institutions (government, parliament and EU). A final section discusses different avenues for constructing indicators of societal progress.
Statistical Journal of the IAOS
The growing importance of statistical evidence, data and information for political decisions is reflected in the handy and popular formulation 'Data for Policy' (D4P). Under this cover, well-known guiding themes, such as the modernisation of the public sector, or evidence-informed policy-making, are led to new solutions with new technologies and infinitely rich data sources. Data for Policy means more to official statistics than just new data, techniques and methods. It is not least a matter of securing an important function and position for official statistics in the Policy for Data of the future. In order to justify this position, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the tasks of official statistics for the functioning of (democratic) societies, with a view to how these tasks have to be reinterpreted under changing conditions (above all because of digitisation and globalisation).