statistics and government organizations
while digging up some numbers for my previous post i came across some interesting government organizations related to statistics. given that science is measurement, let’s take a look at some government organizations that aggregate measurements.
in the eu, there’s eurostat, whose focus is on pulling together these entities from across their member states. in the uk, last month saw the creation of the uk statistics authority, as required by the statistics and registration service act of 2007. the goal of this new, independent entity is to monitor and report on all official statistics and to provide oversite for the office for national statistics. all of this reform is apparently the result of a eurobarometer survey which showed that british people trust their official statistics less than the citizens of any other member nation. in france, another nation known for its history of achievements in statistics and probability, things seem to be a bit more settled: the insee has been operating since 1946.
in the united states, we have an array of statistics-gathering entities accessible via the fedstats portal. most critical statistics are collected via the economics and statistics administration, under the department of commerce, or via the bureau of labor statistics, which is under the department of labor. the cia, an independent agency, produces its own set of worldwide statistics and makes them available via their factbook. i wonder what kind of master data management or data quality initiatives they have in place to make sure these numbers are aligned?
let’s take a look at a few other countries. in china, the national bureau of statistics has a website that is easy to use and frequently updated. israel’s central bureau of statistics seems to be a similarly modern institution, but india’s ministry of statistics and programme implementation has a website due for an overhaul.
there are a few international organizations with similar missions, as well: the un has the statistics division and the oecd has sourceoecd. for information on countries not mentioned above, both the un and the oecd have links to their respective statistics authorities.
in a future post, i hope to go deeper into what sorts of statistics these entities collect and what problems they hope to address with the intelligent application of statistics. i wonder if they have any data warehouse architects on hand to treat their organizations as giant data integration challenges; if you have any information on the history of any of these institutions or their technical underpinnings, drop me a line! i picked up schumpeter’s history of economic analysis hoping to find some leads myself.
of course the folks at gapminder and swivel, among others, have started collecting this data for you to manipulate. but while the data is interesting, it’s primarily the ways in which the data and analyses influence policy that interests me. i’d love to see a site collecting mentions of data in the deliberations of government so that we can better understand how the data we collect is ultimately used to make decisions in government.
