Improving Official Statistics
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Improving Official Statistics
Improving Official Statistics
Improving Official Statistics
The flagship of the IAOS is the ‘Statistical Journal of the IAOS’. The journal has four regular issues per year, each with an average of around 15-20 articles, focusing on current and emerging issues and challenges related to the management, production and use of official statistics and related public policy matters. The Journal is widely circulated and subscribed to by individuals and institutions in all parts of the world. The ‘Journal’ is available on-line and via a printed publication and is supported by a website www.officialstatistics.com. The website also offers a discussion platform, news, and interviews.
The discussion platform provides an opportunity for the official statistical community to discuss important topics in official statistics. The discussions are based on articles in the Journal.
The Editor in Chief of the SJIAOS is Pietro Gennari, who can be contacted at gennari.sjiaos@gmail.com or you can follow him on LinkedIn. The SJIAOS has also a Twitter (X) account where posts on the Journal are published (see https://twitter.com/OfficialStat1).
A glimpse into this issue’s content:
(https://content.iospress.com/journals/statistical-journal-of-the-iaos/40/4)
Dear Readers,
As this year draws to a close, we are excited to share with you this Special Issue of the Statistical Journal of the IAOS (SJIAOS), focusing on the measurement of the informal economy and informal employment, that is, on the methodological standards to be adopted at international level for identifying the forms of employment where workers lack formal contractual and social protection. All eleven papers contained in this section of the Journal are free access.
The December issue also offers several other papers filled with thought-provoking content and innovative research. Here is a short summary of the key topics discussed in this issue:
1. Editorial: Data Equity and Official Statistics in the Age of Private Sector Data Proliferation
The primary data generator role played today by the private sector, due to widespread digitization of the economy and society, has raised increasing challenges for public access, transparency, and fairness of data assets. Within this context, the World Economic Forum in a number of recent documents has emphasized the importance of data equity as one of the key principles for fair and inclusive data governance. These documents broaden the perspective of the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. While economists seem to focus on preventing monopolistic practices in data markets and ensuring equal benefits for all, statisticians stress the importance of producing data that are representative of all population groups. By combining these perspectives, a holistic approach to data equity can emerge, ensuring that data governance frameworks both uphold the integrity of public data and promote economic fairness. Recently the UN has undertaken a couple of initiatives that can help combine the statisticians’ and economists’ perspectives on data equity. In particular, the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) has adopted two documents (“International Data Governance – Pathways to Progress” and “Proposed Normative Foundations for International Data Governance: Goals and Principles”), that articulate a vision for promoting a multistakeholder approach to international data governance, and suggest a set of common goals and principles that could form its normative basis. Central to these documents are three overarching goals: value, trust, and equity. In particular, data equity is promoted by empowering individuals and communities exercise control over their personal data and ensuring that the benefits of data access are distributed fairly, particularly to vulnerable and marginalized groups. The other initiative was undertaken at the Summit of the Future last September, where the United Nations members adopted a Global Digital Compact with the objective of enabling all countries to benefit from the digital transition. In a landscape dominated by private data sources, governments need to establish partnerships with private companies to obtain data that meet these standards and expand coverage, especially in areas where public sector data is limited. These initiatives provide a novel contribution to the body of recent discussions on data equity and international data governance, triggered by the rapid evolution of the digital ecosystem and the proliferation of private sector data.
2. Special Section: Understanding the informal economy and informal employment – the statistical challenge
This section of the Journal discusses the new definitions of informal economy and informal employment adopted at the 21st International Conferences of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), which add to the core infrastructure for labour market statistics adopted at the 19th and 20th ICLS. These new standards represent a milestone in the ongoing effort to enhance the quality, consistency, and comparability of statistics on the informal economy across regions, countries and statistical sources. It consolidates, updates and extends standards developed over the previous 30 years, providing a comprehensive measurement and indicator framework. This special edition of the journal includes eleven papers that shed light on the evolving landscape of informality statistics, highlighting both the progress made and the hurdles that remain to be addressed. A number of the papers seek to explain and contextualise the newly developed standards and their impact on users and the System of National Accounts. A second block of papers address the range of data needed to better understand informality, demonstrating the need to collect information on additional topics in our standard data collection tools. A third block explores the role that different data sources, such as administrative data or different types of surveys, can play in different settings. Taken together, these contributions serve to underline the important role that these new standards can play in enhancing our understanding of the labour market, as well as to show the means to apply them widely in an integrated and coherent manner. The contributions also demonstrate the relevance of the standards for both developed and developing countries, contrasting the prejudice that informality is only of relevance in lower income settings.
3. The 2024 IAOS Prize for Young Statisticians
A rich section of the Journal is dedicated to the winning papers of the Young Statistician Prize (YSP) of the IAOS for the year 2024. The YSP has been running since 2011, attracting submissions of statisticians who are less than 35 years old from across the world. With this prize the IAOS seeks to actively promote the research of young official statisticians and encourage their involvement in the association and in the implementation of its activities. Today’s young statisticians are tomorrow’s leaders, and they inspire us, “older” statisticians, to think about the current and new frontiers in official statistics.
4. Innovative Statistical Methods
This section of the Journal showcases five papers on innovative research in official statistics that complement the articles on new methods and techniques that were awarded the YSP 2024. The focus of the papers ranges from testing survival models for analysing infant and child mortality, to introducing a dynamic microsimulation model for official population projections; from analysing the profile of immigrant groups using a symbolic data analysis approach, to using tourism satellite accounts to measure the direct and indirect evolution of tourism employment; to applying interregional input-output tables as an effective analytical tool to understand the regional interconnectivity of the food and beverage industry. These diverse papers offer valuable insights that can significantly contribute to the field of official statistics.
I wish you a pleasant reading and, on behalf of the Journal, I would like to thank all contributors, editors and reviewers for their engagement and collaboration.
Looking forward to 2025, we hope to build on these efforts to make the Journal, more than ever, a reference for official statisticians around the world, promoting the debate on emerging strategic topics and the advancements of statistical methods and techniques.
Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season and a productive New Year,
Pietro Gennari
Editor-in-Chief
Statistical Journal of the IAOS
(https://content.iospress.com/journals/statistical-journal-of-the-iaos/40/2),
Editorial – The 55th session of the UN Statistical Commission: promoting inclusivity and protecting statistical systems from political interference by Editor in Chief – Pietro Gennari
The editorial offers a
summary of the key outcomes and some reflections on the 55th session of the UN
Statistical Commission (UNSC), held this year from February 27 to March 1, at
the UN Headquarters in New York. This year’s event, which saw the participation
of over 600 experts from 129 countries, 45 regional and international agencies,
and 8 international NGO, produced a series of pivotal decisions that are
expected to have profound implications for the future of the global statistical
system. These decisions cover a wide variety of topics, from the expansion of
country’s membership, to methodological enhancements in various statistical
domains, to the establishment of working groups for the discussion and
development of statistical standards in new areas.
First and foremost,
however, the fifty-fifth session of the Commission was the occasion to celebrate
the 30th anniversary of the endorsement of the UN Fundamental Principles of
Official Statistics (FPOS) by the Commission itself and the 10th anniversary of
their approval at the highest political level, by the UN General Assembly. With
the objective of strengthening their implementation at country level, the
Commission discussed the proposals to establish an Independent Advisory Board
on the FPOS (IAB) and to revise the FPOS Implementation Guidelines. After a lengthy
debate, the Commission chose to put on hold the creation of the IAB, until
revised terms of reference, membership and criteria for the selection of
experts were decided ‘through a transparent and inclusive consultation
process’.
The strong disagreement
expressed during the session on the formulation of the ToR of the IAB on the FPOS
and its proposed membership reflects the opposition of countries to the
establishment of a perceived watchdog that would have interfered in their
sovereignty and national prerogatives. While countries supported the IAB’s
advocacy and guidance role, they were wary of its monitoring function. However,
removing from the ToR of the Independent Advisory Board the whistleblower’s
responsibility to address any episode of non-compliance with the FPOS, leaves a
huge gap in its assurance framework as there would be no international
mechanism that has the authority to call the attention of the global
statistical community and their institutions to these infringements of the
FPOS.
Political interference and,
more generally, any form of political pressure in official statistics pose
significant threats to the integrity, credibility, and utility of statistical
data. The system currently implemented for monitoring and enforcement of the UN
FPOS at global level, based on the survey carried out every ten years by UNSD,
is inherently weak, episodic, and bound to provide a rosier perspective on
their actual application. In fact, the survey is based on a self-assessment
questionnaire, which relies completely on data provided by national statistical
offices and political authorities. Self-assessment practices should be
supplemented by external examination, verification, and follow-up monitoring
conducted by an independent party to ensure a higher level of quality from a
global perspective, given that official statistics are a global public good
serving the needs of the entire global community, not only those of national
policy-makers or national stakeholders. For these reasons, establishing an
independent advisory body to the UN Statistical Commission has the potential to
mitigate the risks of political interference and strengthen the integrity of
official statistics. Certainly, careful consideration must be given to its
mandate, membership, and operational mechanisms to ensure its effectiveness and
legitimacy. Collaboration with member states will be essential in navigating
the complexities and challenges of implementing such a body successfully.
Interview with Stefan
Schweinfest
Now, turning our attention
to the content of the Journal, the latest issue of the SJIAOS, starts with an
insightful interview with Stefan Schweinfest, director of the UN Statistics
Division, carried out by Pieter Everaers. In this interview, Stefan Schweinfest
talks about his career and professional milestones, discussing the evolving
responsibilities of the UN Statistics Division in response to the increased
complexity of the data ecosystem landscape. He also elaborates on the
contribution of the SDGs to the development of national statistical systems,
the emergence of the Geographic Information System community, and the important
role of the UN Fundamental Principles for Official Statistics for the global
statistical system.
Special Section: The
Future of Agricultural Statistics
The core of the June issue
is dedicated to the Future of Agricultural Statistics. This section of the
Journal, organized by Linda J. Young as Guest Editor, comprises twelve papers
selected from those presented at the ninth International Conference on
Agricultural Statistics (ICAS IX), which was held at the World Bank
headquarters in Washington, DC, on May 17–19, 2023. The selected papers explore
various themes and advancements shedding light on the latest innovations as
well as on the changing needs and prospects that are going to shape the future
of agricultural statistics. These twelve papers cover a wide array of topics: from
discussions on modernization efforts within National Statistical Offices, to
the incorporation of machine learning algorithms in agricultural surveys; from
the analysis of household consumption data for food security, to the assessment
of climate change impacts on water resources.
Surveys in Times of
COVID-19 and in Difficult Settings
This section includes two
papers: the first one examines the impact of the changes in the survey data collection
methods adopted by Statistics Netherlands in response to the disruption of
face-to-face interviews caused by the COVID pandemic; while the second paper is
a simulation study aimed at addressing the challenges of sampling in difficult
settings, particularly when little is known about the population being
surveyed.
Time Series Analysis
This section comprises five
papers that delve into various aspects of time series analysis and its
applications in economic research and forecasting. The focus shifts to
exploring innovative methodologies and data sources to enhance forecasting
accuracy and gain fresh insights into economic dynamics.
| Vol 39/2 | |
| Special theme: | |
| Special theme: Statistics on Governance, Peace and Security (Praia Group) | |
| Manuscript | Author(s) |
| Editorial | Pieter Everaers |
| Interview with George Sciadas, about his book ‘Number Savvy: From the Invention of Numbers to the Future of Data’ | Walter Radermacher, George Sciadas |
| The impact of COVID-19 on Official statistics | |
| Governments measure during the Covid crisis and statistical implications in national accounts: the case of tax deferrals | Luisa Sciandra, Susanna Riccioni |
| Statistics on Governance, Peace and Security | |
| Guest editorial | Jean-LucLTavernier, Joao Cardoso |
| General introduction to the special issue Governance Statistics and the UN Praia City Group | Thomas. Calvo, Jean-Pierre Cling, Mireille Razafindrakato, Francois Roubaud, A. Sougane |
| Now is the Time to Close Gaps in Governance Statistics – And the Praia Group is ready for the challenge | Marie Laberge, Joao de Pina Cardoso, Francois Roubaud, Arvinn Gadgil |
| Public sector governance statistics in Brazil. Challenges and perspectives, and focus on transparency | Leonardo Athias, Luanda Botelho |
| An annual multi-mode survey to measure victimisation in France | T. Razafindranovona, Sandra Zilloniz, Helene Guedj |
| Measuring violence in war-torn countries: a political challenge for development, peace and security | M.-A. Pérouse de Montclos |
| Perceptions and Experiences in Madagascar: Origins of Differences in Terms of Corruption, Criminal Violence and Discrimination | Yvan Andriameva Assany, Faly Hery Rakotomanana |
| Overview of discrimination in Cameroon in 2014: between perception and experience, predominance of the phenomenon | G.F. Ndeffo, R. Niekou, J. Tedou |
| Youth and civic participation in Côte d’Ivoire | Agodio C.J. Boga |
| Sense of Insecurity and Profile of Crime Victims in Mali from 2014 to 2020 | S. Cissé, A. Coulibaly, D.A. Fané, S. Haïïdara, A. Sougané |
| Measuring Governance, Democracy and Participation: Lessons from Two Decades of Experience in Peru | Javier Herrera, Nancy Hidalgo, Francois Roubaud, Mireille Razafindrakato |
| Governance of Official Statistics | |
| Statistical quality assurance and the new data ecosystem and implications of the difference between data and statistics | Matthias Reister |
| AI Tools: A Powerful New Weapon to Combat the Misuse of Statistics | Kate Wilkinson, Emily Barrington |
| Quality Framework for combining survey, administrative and big data for official statistics | Yvonne A.P.M. Gootzen, Piet Days, Arnout van Delden |
| When Is There Enough Data to Create a Global Statistic? | Daniel Mahler, Umar Serajuddin, Hiroko Made |
| Data sources, methodologies and techniques | |
| Data Reconciliation and Estimation in an Agricultural Survey | Habtamu Kassa Benecha, Denise A Abreu, Rachael Jennings, Linda J Young |
| Integration of remote sensing data into national statistical office sampling designs for agriculture | Luis Ambrosio, Luis Iglesias, Carmen Marin, Nicolas Deffense |
| Perception of insecurity in municipalities of Mexico. A Small Area Estimation approach | Mario Santillana, José Antonio Gallegos, Alma Itzel Garcia, Elizabeth Diaz, Daniel Gutiérrez, Nancy Letticia Gonzalez |
| Developing and hosting web data apps in R programming for official statistics | Stratos Moschidis, Athanasios Thanapoulos, Christina Karamichalakou |
| Automatizing model selection in an annual review of seasonal adjustment: a machine learning inspired approach | Yingfu Xie |
| Discussion platform | |
| 16 th discussion | P.C.J. Everaers |
Launch of the 20th discussion – “Good Data are Used Data”
Join us for our 20th discussion titled “Good Data are Used Data” at https://officialstatistics.com/discussion-platform. This discussion reflects on the importance of data utilization alongside production quality, as emphasized by Stefan Schweinfest in his interview that opens this issue of the Journal. To operationalize this concept of ‘good data’, the discussion poses questions on measuring data usage, which involves identifying potential user groups and assessing the magnitude or impact of data use.
Launch of the 19th discussion
With the release of this issue of the Journal, we have launched the 19th discussion inspired by the article “Reflections on Statistical Leadership:
Summary of a Panel Discussion at the WSC.” Readers are encouraged to engage with statements and opinions from Stephen Penneck, John Bailer, Ed Humpherson, Mariana Kotzeva, and Denise Silva in this insightful exchange of ideas.
Launch of the 18th discussion – “Are Data Scientists Going to Replace Statisticians?”
With the release of this issue of the Journal, we have launched the 18th discussion forum, “Are Data Scientists Going to Replace Statisticians?”. You are all invited to provide your opinion on the future ‘job’ profile and required skills of the professionals contributing to the production and dissemination of official statistics at the following link (SJIAOS website): www.officialstatistics.com
17th discussion: “Artificial intelligence: an opportunity, a challenge or a threat for official statistics?”
With the release of the September 2023 issue, we launched the discussion forum on “Artificial intelligence: an opportunity, a challenge or a threat for official statistics?”. This is a great opportunity to provide your opinion on the impact of AI on the production and, especially, on the use of official statistics.
16th discussion: “The impact of AI and the availability of data in the so-called Data ecosystem on the development of official statistics”’
The June 2023 issue saw the release of the 16th discussion on the topic of “The impact of AI and the availability of data in the so-called Data ecosystem on the development of official statistics” This discussion focuses on the issues associated with the possible impact of AI on the data ecosystem, including the governance of official statistics will change thanks to these developments. The discussion includes contributions on views on how statistical offices will function by the end of the decade.
You are invited to contribute to the discussions on: www.officialstatistics.com
We are inviting authors to submit manuscripts on “Assessing the Value of Official Statistics” for a forthcoming Special Issue of the SJIAOS.
With declining budgets, increasing demands and a proliferation of alternative players in the arena of statistics, producers of official statistics are under ever more pressure to stake their claim on public funds, by proving and even quantifying the value of their products. But recent work under the Conference of European Statisticians suggests that in order to prove that something has value, organizations need to properly understand what value means. Value means different things to different people, necessitating decisions about which needs, and whose needs, we are trying to fulfil, how, and why. Any indicators we use to quantify value must be clearly grounded in the concepts they’re supposed to measure. Contributions are sought on how the value of official statistics can be understood, as well as on national and international examples of attempts to assess value in practice, the challenges faced in doing so, and how the resulting information can be harnessed.
The key questions are: How are statistical organizations defining and assessing fulfilment of their goal to add value to society? How do statistical organizations determine the value they are providing to society? How is impact identified and quantified? How can a business case be built for justifying an investment in a major statistical operation?
Submit your articles to https://www.editorialmanager.com/sji/default2.aspx
IAOS members have unlimited online access to all the articles in the SJIAOS, including previous issues.
Members are asked to register themselves at IOS Press (go to the register tab) and once done, to send an email to Ms. Kim Willems (k.willemsn@iospress.nl). She will activate your complimentary access upon receiving your email.
For more information contact Margaret de Ruiter-Molloy at the ISI membership office at m.deruitermolloy@cbs.nl.
Links to the earlier issue and still open discussions:
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