The Role of the Official Statistics in the Context of the Global Crisis

Abstract

Official statistics can be seen as a communication tool on variety of management levels and in different spheres of life of the society. The recent crisis has generated a number of challenges for official statisticians. Financial, economic, and political actors turned to statistics to describe the situation and to detect, assess, andeven forecast these phenomena. Therefore, the main statistical consequence of the crisis is the recognition of the limits of the traditional approaches to statistical production and the importance to go beyond them. The first part of the paper shortly describes position and goals of the official statistics. In its second part therecent challenges are discussed with a particular stress on national accounts, the so-called Principle European Economic Indicators, as well as social statistics. The final chapter presents and analyzes general actions that are being taken at the European level in order to face these challenges and improve the overall quality ofthe official statistics.

Keywords

• Official statistics
• crisis
• challenge
• quality
• Europe