High demand for quality statistics

There is an increasing demand for timely, high quality official statistics from administrative sources within the national statistical system.

Making this assertion, CARICOM’s Regional Statistics Project Director, Dr. Philomen Harrison, said that many strides have been made and are being made by statisticians of the region, including work implemented to develop strategic plans for statistics, known as National Strategies for the Development of Statistics (NSDS).

According to him, these could lead to integrated and well-functioning National Statistical Systems of all statistical producing agencies, with the NSO at the centre of the process.

“The development of the National Statistical System requires this overarching master plan, NSDS, to facilitate the dialogue that is required among key stakeholders, including suppliers of information, in order to guide the process of co-ordination of statistics at the national level and hence, the availability of timely and high quality statistics for decision-making,” he noted.

Commenting on the linkages between the NSDS and the updated Regional Statistical Work Programme (RSWP), which has been produced to enable harmonised statistics that conform to internationally recommended standards, he noted that as part of the RSWP, many frameworks  already exist and are being implemented/or about to be implemented in countries, and these include Core Indicators in areas of Social/Gender Statistics; in Environment Statistics; Caribbean Specific Millennium Development Goals Indicators; Caribbean Specific ICT Indicators and the Minimum Data Set comprising all of the above.

“...Processes and infrastructure such as the Classification Systems; Data Warehousing Systems; Data Submission Protocols we need to adopt and implement so to equalise, as far as possible, our statistics across the region in terms of the comparability, soundness, timeliness and other measures of quality,” Harrison said.

He made the comments earlier this week at the 38th meeting of the Standing Committee of Caribbean Statisticians.