Understanding the value of official statistics1

Abstract

Under ever-increasing pressure to provide more with less, to justify budgets and to earn public trust, official statistics has long been concerned with how to better prove and communicate its value. Being statisticians, our inclination has been to express the value of our offer in quantitative terms. But an ONS-led Task Force under the Conference of European Statisticians (CES) argued that before we can quantify ‘the value of official statistics’ we need to understand what this really means. This entails first articulating our own central goals as providers of a public good and then working outwards from these goals to formulate the means of fulfilling them. Only then can we start to define measurable indicators of achievement to assess how far we are creating this intended value. This is the reverse of the process often followed, which starts out by identifying already-available indicators and tries to determine the aspects of value of which they are indicative. Future international work should focus on developing tools for better understanding the pathways from goals to value indicators; sharing experiences of efforts to prove and improve the value of official statistics; and developing a core set of measures using the methods outlined in the article.