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Abstract:
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Achieving an appropriate balance between accuracy, confidentiality, and transparency is critical to the mission of any official statistical agency. Like statistical agencies worldwide, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) faces demands for official estimates produced at finer levels of detail. In particular, NASS county-level crop estimates become important determinants of the amount of funds disbursed to American farmers and ranchers enrolled in agricultural support programs. In an effort to become more transparent, NASS is seeking to publish defensible measures of uncertainty associated with its annual county-level crop estimates for the first time. Doing so may permit the transition to a CV-based publication standard with a view toward increasing the number of publishable counties. In this work, we identify several key steps necessary to stage a transition to a CV-based standard. Select case studies illustrate the interactions between candidate publication standards and disclosure procedures.
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