Editorial
September is here as is the third issue of the year. Once again, we are fortunate to be able to publish excellent manuscripts from authors in many countries on topics relating to their work in official statistics, and also to have a set of papers that creates a theme. The theme for this issue is “Statistical Business Registers”.
Michael Colledge (Australia) organized an invited session on the development and application of international guidelines for statistical business registers for the 2017 World Statistics Conference (WSC). Here, he provides an excellent summary of the presentations as well as recommendations and reflections on future steps. I hope the manuscripts will inspire others to share their experiences in this area with us and each other. Thank you to Nancy McBeth, IAOS EXCO member, for identifying the session and for making introductions.
Before you get to the manuscripts in the special topic section of the issue, you will read the interview with Ms. Irena Križman. She served as the president of IAOS (2009–2011), and she is a former vice-president of ISI. From 2003–2011, she was the Director-General of the Statistical Office of the Republic Slovenia (SURS). SURS conducted the first completely register-based population census under her leadership.
As always, the views and opinions expressed in the interviews and conversations published in SJIAOS are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the Journal, IAOS nor IOS Press.
Every year, Estadistica and SJIAOS exchange manuscripts for publication in their respective journals. We appreciate this collaboration as it gives us exposure to more international materials. Estadistica is the scientific journal of the Inter-American Statistical Institute (IASI). This year, Victor Guerro and Esperenza Sainz (Mexico) present an analysis of the Manufacturing Business Opinion Survey carried out by Instituto National de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI), Mexico’s national statistical agency. This is an updated version of a manuscript published in Estadistica in 2014 (volume 66, numbers 186–187, pp. 9–29).
We have one of the winning papers from the 2017 IAOS Young Statistician Prize competition. It is an updated version written by Andreas Mayer (Australia). It carries the title “Improving Seasonal Adjustment by Accounting for Sample Error Correlation Using State Space Models.” Our congratulations to the author.
Manuscripts come about in many different ways and find their way to publication in many different ways. In our interviews, we try to find out more about the people behind the numbers. Sometimes, I am curious about the people behind the manuscripts. I wonder how our authors get involved with and become interested in official statistics. In this issue, I wanted to find out how two particular authors found their way to each other and to the IAOS and SJIAOS, so I asked them for background.
Gilbert Habaasa and Jonan Natanba are authors of “Civil Registration and National Identity System All Under One Roof; Uganda’s Fastest Path to the Revitalization of CRVS for Africa”. The authors are members of ISIbalo Young African Statisticians Program (IYASA). I also wanted to know more about the IYASA. They gave me permission to publish their response.
Here is what they wrote:
“The ISIbalo Young African Statisticians Program is a capacity building program for young professionals aged below 35 years on the African Continent. This program was started as a legacy program of the 57th session of the ISI that was held in Durban, South Africa in 2009 with a secretariat housed at Statistics South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. This continental program has over 500 members in 27 African countries and it is premised on promoting life-long learning. The IYAS Program strategic objectives include: (i) to develop the expertise of Africans in the core areas of the statistical production value chain, (ii) to increase the number of Africans participating in scientific research, (iii) to create opportunities for scientific research on matters of Africa’s development, (iv) to integrate all country-based statistical capacity building initiatives and programs in Africa, (v) to address African statistical imbalances due to socio-political dispensations. Members are organized under the 14 statistical dimensions of Strategy for Harmonization of Statistics in Africa (SHaSA). This paper was presented as a poster at the 28th International Population Conference of the International Union of the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) from 29th October-4th November 2017 in Cape Town, South Africa. The authors received constructive comments from the delegates including members of regional CRVS core group and [their comments] were incorporated. Previously, Gilbert Habaasa was a research fellow at the CRVS Secretariat housed by the African Centre for Statistics, UNECA (October 2013 to 06
I appreciate the authors willingness to share their story and I hope you enjoy all the manuscripts in this issue.
Kirsten West
Editor-in-Chief
September 2018
Statistical Journal of the IAOS
E-mail: kwestiaos@gmail.com
