National Statistical Organizations

Working with Statistical Offices over the years,  PARADIGMA  has identified the following trends and challenges these institutions are faced with:

• Politicians as well as society at large demand more current, relevant and detailled information along with easy, self service access to the data.
• Budget reductions in the public sector encourage statistical offices to permanently improve the efficiency of their operations and their statistical production processes.
• Transparency of the production processes, supplementary documentation and ever higher data quality are among the top requirements of consumers of the information products.
• Citizens and respondents in general are increasingly resisting the survey based approach of data collection and demand less intrusive instruments; they also are concerned about the privacy of their data.
• Research and Scientific Institutions require access to micro-level data to enable empirical research in (Health, Personal Income, Business, Transport, ...) oftentimes conflicting with the requirement to maintain the privacy of the data.

PARADIGMA's initiatives

Statistical Production Processes

• Using existing administrative data sources wherever possible in lieu of questionnaires and services, is a favored means to increase the efficiency of statistical production processes. (Innorfdat-X : A new approach to collect road transport statistics)
• Reuse of Classifications beyond the survey they have originally been developed for not only reduces costs, but enables cross survey analyses and comparisons.
• The seamless transfer of intermediate products along the stages of the statistical product process reduces errors and improves the productivity of the process.
• Metadata production and documentation concurrent with the development of the statistical products enhance the quality and usability of the published statistics.

Dissemination und Publication

Administrative statistics have to reconcile the requirement for ever more detail with the imperative to maintain the privacy of the individual. PARADIGMA’s particular approach calls for

• the anonymization of the individual records (stripping personal identifiers)
• the deployment of randomization and perturbation methods applied to guard against statistical inference to be used to identify individuals within small groups.

Use of published information

The number of people interested in and using statistical products is continuously rising, encouraged by the easy availability and affordability of information and communication technology. Consequently statistical offices are encouraged to enable this growing numbers of customers to access, analyse and use this information.

PARADIGMA's approach is predicated on the

• presentation of related datasets which can be combined to gain new insights (i.e. trade and transportation data)
• self-service idea, enabling customers to analyze the data, to develop reports and to share them with others without the need for expert assistance.
• geographic and advanced visualization methods

References

National Road Accident Statistics

Use of electronically filed police reports on accidents as the primary source of the statistics. Development of self-service reports and analyses using SuperSTAR technology.

Vehicle Registry

Accessing administrative registers and providing the data in easy accessible databases, enables the business analysts to perform sophisticated analyses on behalf of their clients within hours instead of several days.

Romanian Agricultural Census, Population Census 2011

Analysis, self-service reporting and dissemination of the collected data

Public Sector National Accounts

Rule based system to generate the transactions and financial accounts for the public sector based upon the quarterly and annual accounts published by federal, state and municipal governments and public institutions.

Integrated Statistics on Taxation in Austria

Data transfer, mapping and combination of different taxes (corporate, income, property, VAT, ...) and preparation of intermediate statistical products for reuse within the NSI as well as for publication.