Official statistics
[7] Governmental agencies at all levels, including municipal, county, and state administrations, may generate and disseminate official statistics.
For example: Almost every country in the world has one or more government agencies (usually national institutes) that supply decision-makers and other users including the general public and the research community with a continuing flow of information (...).
Official statistics should be objective and easily accessible and produced on a continuing basis so that measurement of change is possible.
They are then disseminated to help users develop their knowledge about a particular topic or geographical area, make comparisons between countries or understand changes over time.
Official statistics make information on economic and social development accessible to the public, allowing the impact of government policies to be assessed, thus improving accountability.
[10] According to the first Principle "Official statistics provide an indispensable element in the information system of a democratic society, serving the government, the economy and the public with data about the economic, demographic, social and environmental situation".
They use official statistics in order to be informed on a particular topic and to observe trends within the society of a local area, country, region of the world.
For instance, those users will take some official statistics into consideration before launching a product, or deciding on a specific policy or on a marketing strategy.
The statistical system must be free from interference that could influence decisions on the choice of sources, methods used for data collection, the selection of results to be released as official, and the timing and form of dissemination.
These organizations are responsible for producing and disseminating official statistical information, providing the highest quality data.
Quality in the context of official statistics is a multi-faceted concept, consisting of components such as relevance, completeness, timeliness, accuracy, accessibility, clarity, cost-efficiency, transparency, comparability and coherence.
The core tasks of NSOs, for both centralized and decentralized systems, are determining user needs and filtering these for relevance.
Disadvantages include the high cost of data collection and the quality issues relating to non-response and survey errors.
Television is the primary news source for citizens in industrialized countries, even if radio and newspapers still play an important role in the dissemination of statistical information.
On the other hand, newspapers and specialized economic and social magazines can provide more detailed coverage of statistical releases as the information on a specific theme can be quite extensive.
The development of computing technologies and the Internet has enabled users - businesses, educational institutions and households among others- to have access to statistical information.
Today the advanced agencies provide the information on their websites in an understandable way, often categorized for different groups of users.
The quality criteria of a national statistical office are the following: relevance, impartiality, dissemination, independence, transparency, confidentiality, international standards [citation needed].
When releasing information, data and official statistics should be relevant in order to fulfil the needs of users as well as both public and private sector decision makers.
Once the survey has been made, the NSO checks the quality of the results and then they have to be disseminated no matter what impact they can have on some users, whether good or bad.
Moreover, the impartiality principle implies the fact that NSOs have to use understandable terminology for statistics' dissemination, questionnaires and material published so that everyone can have access to their information.
In order to maximize dissemination, statistics should be presented in a way that facilitates proper interpretation and meaningful comparisons.
They should not make any political advice or policy-perspective comments on the results released at any time, even at press conferences or in interviews with the media.
But if errors in the results occur before or after the data revision,[23] they should be directly corrected and information should be disseminated to the users at the earliest possible time.
Producers of official statistics have to set analytical systems in order to change or improve their activities and methods.
Moreover, the overall structure, including concepts and definitions, should follow internationally accepted standards, guidelines or good practices.
