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The amount together with the modalities of provision of funds and other resources to statistical offices create opportunities for pressure on statistical principles and ethics via various means of interference in official statistics and via the development of self-censorship. A shorter time distance between the provision of funds and statistical production leads to more risks for ethics. So does a shorter distance in terms of political involvement in the use of funds in statistical production. We make a proposal for a multiannual statistics office budget to be adopted by the legislature, with its implementation lagged by more years than in an electoral cycle, and for setting up a trust fund fed by predetermined transfers from the government and by a prespecified share of a tax. An annual lump sum allocation would be made from the trust fund to the statistics office by a law-provided committee of representatives of users reflecting official statistics' global public good nature. Full financial autonomy would be given to the statistics office to use the resources provided. A set of additional specific conditions are discussed that ought to be provided for in national law to supplement and support the implementation of this proposal, including for safeguarding good financial management, efficiency and accountability in the use of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the manipulation of official statistics is corruption and indeed it is grand corruption and political corruption. We note the steps that have been taken in recent decades, which inter alia help make corruption in official statistics more difficult, but argue that instances of corruption persist. To decisively address the problem, it is important to have an analytical tool for understanding it. In this context, we provide a typology of the various broad manifestations or phenomena of corruption in official statistics. We then proceed to identify the process or mechanism that gives rise to these manifestations/phenomena, the elements/component parts of this process/mechanism and the ways these parts interact. This constitutes the schematic model that we propose for understanding corruption in official statistics. In this context, we provide a discussion of the nature of the individual elements/component parts of the process of corruption of official statistics, i.e., we discuss the drivers of the phenomena, the enabling conditions of the phenomena, the modalities and methods used to arrive at the phenomena, and the vectors or agents that execute/propagate the phenomena. We believe all cases of corruption in official statistics can be analyzed using this schematic model. The benefit of having such a model is that it enables one to identify what institutional or legal setting, action, institution or person presents a problem, vulnerability or source of risk in a given system of production of a specific official statistical product in a given country, and address it. The model can also inform a discussion about what needs to be changed at the level of international/supranational arrangements, whether concerning institutional settings, processes, or legal and ethical frameworks, affecting the production of official statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguments for prerelease access recall the 'public interest', but the interests served are, at the end of the day, not the ones of the public. Prerelease access is inconsistent with first principles of statistical ethics: impartiality, objectivity, independence. It is actually a potent enabling condition for undermining the integrity of official statistics and undercutting the public's trust in these statistics. It serves as a vehicle for unfair gains – whether political, economic, or career. Prerelease access is not necessary either for policy conduct or for the public's understanding of the statistics; there are appropriate substitutes. In this paper we discuss in some detail arguments for and against prerelease access to official statistics by the government and/or the press. We recommend complete elimination of prerelease access by both the government in power and members of the press. We also advocate that contradictions in codified principles regarding prerelease access under the principle of impartiality must also be addressed: there should be no place there for 'double think'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of official statistics should not be carried out by one of the branches of government whose performance is being assessed on the basis of these statistics. Given that official statistics are tasked with providing the branches of government and the public with the information that enables checking on the performance of various parts of government, the optimal institutional setup for statistical production has to avoid conflict of interest. To do so and to fully and sustainably meet the standard of professional independence, the production of statistics should not be part of the executive branch of government, i.e., it should have institutional independence. The paper presents behaviors and practices consistent with professional independence and discusses the capacity to implement them given the modalities of dependence when statistics production is part of the executive, taking into account safeguards. It concludes that significant risks remain for abuse of the currently existing dependencies of statistics production on the executive and the distinct possibility persists for external pressure or self-censorship, while trust in statistics is not maximized. The paper outlines elements of the needed paradigm shift of institutional independence for official statistics and discusses the costs and benefits of such a shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to advance the discussion on the need for an international-global system of review and assessment of the implementation of the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (UNFP). It introduces an analytical argument of why official statistics and their quality is a "global public good", which needs to be managed appropriately at the global level so as to achieve a socially optimal outcome. While progress has been made in promoting the UNFP, the current system of monitoring their implementation and thus the quality of official statistics in individual countries is severely limited. This is because it is a system of voluntary self-assessment and self-monitoring and thus of limited reliability and usefulness. Moreover, the peer reviews that have taken place, although helpful, do not constitute the appropriate long term solution to the issue of optimally managing the global public good of official statistics. Instead, effective compliance monitoring of the implementation of the UNFP, through regular evaluation, verification, follow-up and published reports in the form of audits by an independent international institution, is essential for rigorous, timely and harmonized implementation of the UNFP. The paper also discusses aspects of setting up the proposed international institution and global system of monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]