6.1 Introduction

Official statistics are the responsibility of central governments in most countries. In most countries, the main tasks related to official statistics are entrusted to a specialized government agency, office, or institution with official statistics as its main or core function. The name of such an agency would typically reflect its function: common names are national statistical office (NSO), which is used in this Handbook, central statistical office (CSO), national statistical institute (NSI), national institute of statistics (NIS), central bureau of statistics (CBS), and shorter names linking the function and the country, such as Statistics Canada, Statistics Sweden etc.

Box 2: Mission statement, vision statement and values

A mission statement is a sentence or short paragraph that defines the existence of a business, non-profit, government organization, or any other entity. Mission statements get at the heart of why an organization exists, rather than how it exists. A mission statement articulates the organization’s purpose both for those in the organization as well as for the public and other stakeholders. Some organizations prefer providing a vision statement. The difference is that a mission statement focuses on an organization’s present state while a vision statement focuses on an organization’s future. A mission statement answers the question “Who are we?” and the vision statement answers the question “Where are we going?”. Finally, an organization’s values statement highlights the organization’s core principles and code of ethics. The organization’s core values shape daily culture and establish standards of conduct against which actions and decisions can be assessed and philosophical ideals.Mission, vision and values statements of NSOs reflect the core undertaking of an organization entrusted with developing, collecting, processing, analysing, and disseminating essential demographic, economic, social, and environmental statistics to supports public and private decision–making. For more information, Annex 4 - Mission - Vision - Values Statements provides a few examples of mission, vision and values statements of selected national statistical offices.

In the last few decades, the development of the NSOs in the various countries has many common traits, especially regarding its legal basis and main functions, but also shows many variations depending on the countries’ administrative systems. Originally, most NSOs operated on the basis of legislation that was specific to each country. Following the development and adoption of the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, UNFPOS, since the early 1990s, the statistical legislation in a large number of countries has come to be based on these principles. Thus, as an increasing number of countries adopted and applied the UNFPOS, the legal basis of national official statistics has converged to the extent that despite different national traditions and legal structures, statistical legislation in a great number of countries is quite similar in content.

The mandates and functions of the NSOs are normally spelt out in the statistical laws, as well as the scope of their operations, their obligations and rights, and their place within the national administrations. Acknowledging that there may be considerable differences between NSOs in different countries as regards size, technical infrastructure and capacity, the similarities in their roles, functions and main activities are much more pronounced and more important.