7.4 Needs of Government and administration#
The main purpose of an NSO is to provide data to all their stakeholders, the largest and most important of which is the Government. Availability of trustworthy and timely statistics is crucial, for instance, for a correct assessment of the monetary and economic situation of a country. Census data inform decisions to allocate resources across programmes and plan public services, such as building new hospitals, schools or roads. Statistics influence the direction of fiscal, economic and trade policies, social welfare and environmental policy decisions, and target efforts to improve efficiency and productivity and identify cost savings.
An NSO supports users and provides capacity at all levels of governments – from the highest echelons of the national government to ministries, regional, provincial and municipal levels. This support includes anything from providing statistical profiles to informing strategic plans and helping departments with indicator frameworks and data for reporting.
Governments need an NSO (as well as other compilers of official statistics) to meet their data requirements either in the form of regular, planned statistical collections or via specific, ad hoc data collection exercises. Regular data collection can be high frequency, such as consumer prices, annual data such as annual growth rate international migration, or less frequently collected data, such as a population census. Ad hoc data collections are also needed to provide answers to specific questions that arise and require compilation of new information and perhaps reorganization of existing data.
7.4.1 The needs of ministries, government departments and agencies#
Government ministries, departments and agencies are responsible for defining and implementing government policies in their specialised sector. They need official data and statistics to prepare and monitor their national development plans and sectoral plans.
Maintaining good relations with government units is obviously an important part of the work of the chief statistician and the NSO. The structure and organization of the various ministries, government departments and agencies can vary greatly according to the situation of each country. Most countries, however, will have ministries of the interior, foreign affairs, defence, justice, finance, education, economy, labour, administration, education, agriculture, environment and health, each of which an NSO will need to interact with.
The ministries responsible for health and education tend to be the largest of the service ministries, with portfolios that cover both public and private sectors. The information requirements of these ministries have become increasingly dominated by the notion of effectiveness, which requires measuring the outcomes of their policies and actions administrative records are insufficient to measure outcomes. As a result, questions about effectiveness lead to demands for supplementing administrative records with independently generated statistical information within an analytical framework.
The needs of ministries responsible for finance are long-standing, even though the form in which data must be presented changes along with advances in economics and accounting. Their needs range from measuring the wealth of the country to balancing the State ledgers and setting aside resources for future generations. A ministry responsible for finance must know how changes in quantities and prices interact to change value. By and large, a ministry responsible for finance is more interested in statistics that relate to rapidly changing variables, such as the demand, rather than the supply, side of the overall balance. For this reason, its questions tend to be clustered around the behaviour of the major demand aggregates: consumers, the confidence with which they behave in the marketplace, and the portion of their incomes they are prone to save; investors and the structures and equipment they wish to acquire; businesses abroad and the willingness they display to purchase nationally produced goods and services. Other ministries are more interested in looking into the supply side of the balance.
The data management needs of the various ministries are linked to the organization of the NSS and the role of the NSO. Of particular importance is whether the national system is centralised or decentralised (see Chapter 4.5.3 — Interaction with user groups outside the statistical advisory council: capturing their information needs).
In a centralised NSS, the NSO has specialised subject area units that manage a number of statistical activities of interest to line ministries.
Depending on the degree of centralisation, a unit may play an advisory role or be responsible for liaison or dialogue with a particular ministry if the ministry is a source of data. The unit would have the subject-matter expertise needed to predict statistical requirements.
In a decentralised NSS, the data management expertise in ministries that produce official statistics would reside in a statistical unit within the ministry itself. Depending on the degree of decentralisation, these units could have their own data collection capability or alternatively, the ministry could request the NSO to carry out data collection on its behalf. In cases that the NSO does not carry out the surveys or censuses, it may review and evaluate them to ensure that they conform with standard definitions, concepts and classifications and that the statistics generated from these surveys are reliable, accurate, and comparable. (As an example, the Philippine Statistics Authority adopts a mechanism called the Statistical Survey Review and Clearance System where surveys and censuses sponsored or conducted by agencies are evaluated), An NSO could also commission a third party, such as an international organization or private sector, to take charge of any data collection operations.
The following activities could form part of the user engagement strategy for ministries:
Prioritising activities and communicating the information to its users.
Establishing formal agreements between the NSO and ministries for the compilation of tailored statistical services or the provision of source data from the ministry to the NSO.
Promoting regular formal consultations for ministries.
7.4.2 Regional and local government#
The interactions an NSO has with regional and local government lead to similar issues to those it has with ministries, the key difference being that ministries are related to subject matter whereas regional government cuts across geography. Local governments face an intensified need for local policymaking and need reliable regional statistical information to support their evidence-based policymaking.
The issues arising for an NSO in its work with local government can vary enormously from country to country depending on its political organization, size, infrastructure, capacity and other variables.
Problems can be caused by the difficulties of communication and gaining access to officials in remote areas, or to satisfy the information needs of various layers of government.
It is important that the NSO has good communications with regions and that the relationship with the local government does not become imbalanced and lead to the evolution of alternative data collection agencies. This may result in the overall coordination becoming much more difficult to manage. Where a network of provincial and district statistical offices is in place, there is the capacity within these offices to support provincial and local government stakeholders and serve to link these to the national office. It is also important that the NSO has the same approach for regional and local governments, even though their needs might be different in scope and type of requested information. Staff can be seconded to various regional agencies to help connect them with official statistics, data and insights. A statistics committee may be convened at the sub-national level to provide guidance and direction to statistical development activities in regions and provinces. This committee, with members composed of line agencies, academic, private sector and local government, can serve as a venue to improve statistical planning, programming, and coordination at the sub-national level.
An NSO does not usually have a requirement to address all regional needs for statistics unless resources are specifically provided for that purpose. Many NSOs provide regionally detailed statistics and also perform additional tailored statistical services for regional bodies that are chargeable.
The following activities could form part of the user engagement strategy for regional and local government:
Providing nationally compiled statistics to regions accompanied by regional and local breakdowns.
Defining the conditions of access to regional and local databases.
Providing support for regional and local agencies that wish to supplement their own databases with resources available at the national level.
Providing guidance on ways to ensure the reliability of regional statistics on issues such as the use of geographic classifications.
Promoting regular formal consultations for regions.
Statistics Poland STRATEG system (🔗) for programming and monitoring of development policy – an example of meeting stakeholders’ needs.