Abstract
National Statistical Offices (NSO's) need data for the production of statistics. Apart from data obtained through surveys, NSO's are increasingly using other data sources (for example, data collected by other organizations). Disadvantages here come from the fact that very often an NSO uses an administrative data source for a purpose different than the one for which the data was originally collected. As a result of this difference, the 'statistical' usability of a data source needs to be thoroughly studied by an NSO before its use.
Some more possible problems of statistics are the following: data sources, recent data, regularity, timeliness of data, updating data, time series, data frequency (annual, quarterly, monthly or daily data required), data comparability (is it possible to compare one country's performance against another or group of countries etc.), data costs. Sometimes, the required data do not exist; data from different sources are not always comparable. Also, the quality of some information needs an improvement.
It is therefore of vital importance that a systematic approach is available to determine the quality of statistical data. For this purpose a quality framework have been developed by authors to determine whether statistical data is of quality required for their intended use.
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