The concept and commodity of official statistics
Abstract
New threats and opportunities make it imperative to rethink the foundations of official statistics. This essay examines the industry's freedom of action. It identifies four ways of defining official statistics and considers their impact. It treats official statistics as a commodity, and the prospects of trading the commodity are examined relative to the concepts of public and private goods, merit goods and the common good, goods versus services, search, experience and credence goods, semi-finished and finished products. Product quality is discussed relative to the quality criteria of conformance to specifications and fitness for purposes, and the means to achieve quality are discussed as standardisation and customisation. The means determine the comparability of the statistics, and comparability determines the opportunities for perfect and monopolistic competition. The essay notes that the official statistics industry empowers those who compare, but also that it makes an exception for itself. Finally it is suggested that the biggest threat to the statistical agencies may not be the coming of competition but inability to rejuvenate the product set due to confinement in the state's bureaucracy.
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