Klaus Reeh Adviser to the Director General Eurostat, Luxembourg

1. Official Statistics:a lot of light, but also some shadow2nd International Statistical ConferenceInvestment in the Future Klaus Reeh Adviser to the Director General Eurostat, Luxembourg

2. My plan for this presentation • animating a discussion about our role as official statisticians in our societies • special emphasis on our role in the EU • looking at our performance in recent years • success as well as difficulties or shortcomings • making some proposals for coping better with both our successes and shortcomings • a tentative answer to the question of this session • Official statistics: luxury or necessity?

3. a lot of light in recent years, .. broader coverage, faster available, more detailed, ... in short higher quality more accessible and better presented, more useful for science and analysis, business and management, politics and lobby, for the media, the civil society and the public at large more transparent in our operations and more credible in our results

4. a widely recognised success, … Official statistics are perceived as important for making our democracies more participative for making our economies more efficient and dynamic for making our societies more robust and less conflict-laden through facilitating well-informed decision-making by all sorts of actors (individual or collective, economic, social or political) Our image has improved and out self-esteem got stronger there are lots of reasons for us to be proud of

5. but also some shadow … A variety of issues/challenges have to be dealt with almost permanently Organisational issues resources, burden, demand pressure Methodological issues conventions, transformations, sources Political issues legitimacy, usage, technocracy, europeanisation Epistemological issues self-referentiality, imputation, reconciliation, and aesthetic accounting we are exposed to all sorts of pressure (legislators, users, financiers, respondents, and caught between stools

6. and some dangerous trends increased use of official statistics for all sorts of decisions, in particular political decisions increased europeanisation of nationally produced official statistics repetitive discussions about quality and credibility increasing requirements and continuing resource cuts increasing technical complexity whilst having to assure a maximum of transparency stronger reluctance to impose response obligations more legalisation/codification (requirements/ obligations) and bureaucratisation (planning and control) 6

7. How to cope with the persisting issues? • General conditions continue to be favourable for us • Zeitgeist is on our side, as numeracy is on the rise everywhere in our societies • ICT is also on our side, as technology helps us to cope with dwindling resources and growing demand • Political conditions are better, especially at EU level • European Statistics Code of Practice is well received • new governance framework has been put in place • broad agreement among official statisticians about the challenges ahead (Cracow Action Plan) • what else? and what specifically at national and EU level?

8. First general recommendation we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by our political successes The more of our statistics become politically relevant (as eligibility criteria, compliance indicator, performance measurements, taxation parameters) the more political statistics become. And the more politicised official statistics become, the more we have to invest in maintaining their credibility for political as well as non-political usage. Thus there is an optimum of political usage that should not be exceeded.

9. Second general recommendation we should be more modest in our attitude towards what we are doing Economists seem to believe that the truth is revealed above all through elegant models, statisticians should not believe that rich statistics allow unearthing the truth. Statistics are only useful in the context of well established practices, but they do not hold answers for everything

10. Third general recommendation we should be more aware of possible dangers related to an excessive use of statistics Excessive use in politics might lead to technocratic politics: politics as numeric optimisation process Excessive use in economics might lead to mechanic economics

11. First specific recommendation we should be more aware of the concrete limits of our statistics and make our users aware as well Statistics are based on specific conventions for casting phenomena into numbers. No doubt, our conventions make sense, but there are areas on which they cannot shed light. The limits to the numeric accuracy of our statistics are particularly important and should therefore be underlined as well

12. Second specific recommendation we should be more eclectic and simpler in our approach and avoid too much statistical aesthetics The world is too complex; thus asking us for a coherent and encompassing description of the world is asking too much. Our response can only be diversity and partiality . Statistical aesthetics might be quite dangerous as it leads to replacing observational content by imputation

13. Third specific recommendation we should have the courage to reveal (and not conceal) any discontinuities Our smoothed time series can generate an illusion of continuity, a precondition for believing too much in extrapolations. Retropolation might in the end be more a disservice than a service to our users our production processes (from data collection to statistics compilation) should conversely be more stable in time. Change should then be made all at once.

14. Fourth specific recommendation we should be more critical towards new demand and in particular more official in our self-understanding All too often official statisticians are accused of not responding to new demands. A supply of a public service, and official statistics are such a service, requires adequate political authorisation. Thus official statistics should not be provided without an authorisation by the respective legislative and budgetary authorities

15. Statistics: luxury or necessity? only a question for official statistics if we believe that public luxury is a bad thing to be answered on a case by case basis only too expensive statistics might be a luxury Too expensive compared to what? Are there candidates? What about Intrastat? statistics with too few users might be a luxury Does the number of users count? Any candidates? infotainment might be a luxury Is entertainment bad? Any candidates? but is “statistical luxury” really a problem? not at all compared to other “public luxury”

16. Statistics: a collective good or bad? again only a question for official statistics if we do not believe that statistics are always a good thing once again only to be answered on a case by case basis official statistics can be seen as a kind of numeric collective memory we simply cannot live without memory and a numeric memory has a lot of operational advantages but we have to be aware that there is no numeric memory without oblivion (also due to the fact that not everything can be cast into numbers all in all, it is a matter of dosage: too much statistics might be bad for our health, but too little statistics as well

17. A last word on official statistics in the current crisis no complacency, no negligence, no wrongdoing by official statisticians instead economists (especially financial analysts as number crunchers) were on the wrong track, but official statisticians made it too easy for them to believe in their predictions of the unpredictable official statisticians can be reproached with having failed to make the limits of their statistics understood helped to accelerate a self-referential wheel animated the fantasy of ever more betters economic short-term statistics: case of a nuisance?