Boundaries and coordination of the National Statistical System (NSS)

Abstract

The production and dissemination of Official Statistics on a national level involves besides the National Statistical Institutes sometimes numerous institutional actors. International references such as the European Statistics Code of Practice, ESCoP, or the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, UNFPoS, are organisational frameworks that aim at clarifying and facilitating to clarify and facilitate coordination amongst different producers of data and statistics. However, since the organisation of National Statistical Systems (NSS) varies considerably between the poles of centralisation and decentralisation, the different roles of data producers and various producers of Official Statistics, as well as the coordination of collaboration, is often far from being unambiguously understood. This paper is based on a presentation given at a session (IPS-071) jointly organised by the Statistical Office of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) at the 62 ${}^{\text{nd}}$ ISI World Statistics Congress 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, titled “Where are the boundaries of Official Statistics”. It addresses some frequently-recurring questions related to the different roles and delimitations in the NSS (e.g. data providers, other producers of Official Statistics, National Central Banks, users of Official Statistics, etc.).