Bo Sundgren: 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.

At this seminar I will discuss 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. I will elaborate such a holistic approach from a number of different perspectives.

These thoughts have also inspired a vision for the European Statistical System (ESS) outlined by the European Commission. The vision is based on the assumption that the traditional stovepipe approach to official statistics, both in member states and within Eurostat, is going to be replaced by a more holistic, integrated, coherent, and systems-oriented approach, both as regards the statistical contents, and as regards the technical solution. The term “data warehouse” is used to cover both these aspects.

References.

Sundgren, B. (2010). A systems approach to official statistics. Official Statistics in Honour of Daniel Thorburn, pp. 225–260.

Sundgren, B. (2011). Towards a system of official statistics based on a coherent combination of data sources. Paper presented at the ESRA conference in Lausanne.

Commission of the European Communities (2009). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the Production Method of EU Statistics: a Vision for the next Decade. Brussels, COM(2009)404 final.