Twenty years of the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics: The present and an outlook into the future

Abstract

The United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (FPOS) are seen as one element in the long history of Official Statistics [1]. In recent years, we have seen that international principles like the UN FPOS are given a higher priority. Official statistics, after all, is not only about straight forward counting of well-defined phenomena, but a process that includes defining and acting on quite complex concepts [2,3]. Despite the fact that it has been twenty years since the first UN FPOS were issued, their core text is not revised. This “stability” is not in conflict with the fact that the FPOS also stimulate the modernization of official statistics. In this paper, the value of political independence of statistical agencies is discussed in detail. FPOS should serve as a tool for democracy which is a demanding task. Data issues as well as national and international coordination are also briefly discussed. The topics covered by the ten UN FPOS may be grouped into a number of main topics (Table 1). First, we will emphasize the role and governance and general quality (1, 2 and 4) and also the information to be provided to users and metadata (3 and 7). Then, we will discuss: data collection, confidentiality, processing or treating (5 and 6); coordination of official statistics at the national level (8); and, finally, international cooperation (9 and 10).