Funding of official statistics

Abstract

The concern that funding policies and practices may influence the integrity and quality of official statistics is relatively recent. In the early 1980’s, NSOs in Europe were predominantly funded by the central government. In the late 1980’s, governments in some countries started to economise on the outlays to the NSOs encouraging them to market their products. In the 1990’s, several NSOs spent considerable effort on marketing and devising rules for the pricing of their digital products. With the great digital advances made in the course of the 1990s, the pricing efforts became basically meaningless. The NSOs again became dependent on government funding. This was underpinned by the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and their emphasis on integrity and professional independence. This re-awakened and underscored the long-held view of official statistics being public good to be shared by all interests and be publicly funded. If that principle is accepted and practiced, we are then left with the issues of how to arrange such funding in a way that allows full efficiency to be brought to the statistical processes and does not interfere with the professional independence and integrity of the NSOs. This issue is the subject of this paper.