Official statistics agencies strive to be efficient and provide value for money.
Official statistics are public goods; the provision of these goods is the responsibility of the public sector and is funded by tax revenue. Statistics producers are required to spend government-sourced funding wisely by producing and delivering statistics efficiently. It is also important to manage and maintain the existing statistical database as a valuable asset able to produce new official statistics at reasonable cost.
Key elements of this principle
- Surveys and processing systems are to the greatest possible extent designed with sufficient flexibility to accommodate changes in user needs.
- Appropriate opportunities to reduce costs are actively sought. These include economies of scale, data integration, and methodologies and systems developments that use generic, automated processes.
- Administrative sources are used to their full potential for statistical purposes.
The cost-efficiency of producing a statistical product is a measure of the costs and respondent load relative to the output. Costs can be contained by technical measures such as:
- standardising and harmonising surveys
- better exploitation of existing surveys, especially microdata
- shared use of data, particularly administrative data
- improved survey methods using modern information communication technology techniques
- use of sampling techniques.
Back to OSS principles for Tier 1 statistics producers.