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469 – Official Statistics: Policy and Practice

Extracting Statistical Offices from Policy Making Bodies to Buttress Official Statistical Production

at Amherst College

The system of statistical offices being part of policy making bodies is a "legacy" institutional setup that increases the risks for the implementation of professional independence and other statistical principles during the production of official statistics. Risks, such as "pressure risk" and "political attack risk", ceteris paribus increase as they are mediated and amplified by hierarchical, administrative and resource dependencies of statistics production on the policy making body the statistics office is part of. Higher risks means higher costs. Costs outweigh any benefits from a statistics office being part of a policy making institution, and it would be more effective and appropriate to extract the former from the latter. Having statistical offices extracted from policy making institutions does not mean that risks or their perception will disappear, but that they would materialize with a lower probability. Additional steps would need to be taken to decrease this probability further-full institutional independence of official statistics production along with other safeguards. Extracting statistical offices from policy making institutions is, however, one necessary step on the road to buttress the long term robustness and sustainability of professional independence and of other fundamental statistical principles. This is in the best interest of official statistical producers as well as of the very wide variety of users of official statistics in modern society, including among them policy makers and political leaders.