The relationship between government and the national statistical institute

Abstract

The paper presents the Polish experience in relations between the official statistics and the government in the period of the social and economic transition and discusses selected issues related to the implementation of the Fundamental Principles in Poland. The author discusses the implemen- tation of the Fundamental Principles concentrating on the major hazards, social context of the trans- formation of statistics in the period of transition and the encountered difficulties. He concludes by stating that the Fundamental Principles are viable and facilitate relations with the government and guard the objectivity, impartiality and transparency of statistics, but still a lot of work is to be done to maintain the dialogue with the government and society on the demand for and quality of statisti- cal data. The problem of the relationship between the Government or - in general terms - the authorities and official statistics requires to take into account the conse- quences of social, political and economic changes which took place in the Central and East European countries, on the one hand, and the progress of transformation and the integration with the European Union, on the other. It is obvious that this may refer to the situation of a concrete country and to concrete experience. I would like to present to you the Polish experience in this respect, or to be more precise, the experience of Polish statistics in the period 1990-1997. However, discussion in this respect requires making some general assumptions, because the organisation of a public discussion of European statisticians on the issues con- cerning the relationship between Governments, or the authorities in general, and official statistics requires that statistics be released each time from the obligation to refer to the political environment. This is important, because the conditions affecting the development of official statistics and the development of co-opera- tion of European statistics, especially the Central and East European statistics, could still be influenced by political decisions. In practice the independence of statistics from politics is exercised when the programme of co-operation is imple- mented independently of the orientation and decisions of Governments. This means it is necessary to read and interpret the Fundamental Principles in a way which is adequate for the turn of the century. In order to meet that objective, it is necessary to discuss the issues from the standpoint of two perspectives - a new