On new data sources for the production of official statistics

Abstract

In the past years we have witnessed the rise of new data sources for the potential production of official statistics, which, by and large, can be classified as survey, administrative, and digital data. Apart from the differences in their generation and collection, we claim that their lack of statistical metadata, their economic value, and their lack of ownership by data holders pose several entangled challenges lurking the incorporation of new data into the routinely production of official statistics. We argue that every challenge must be duly overcome in the international community to bring new statistical products based on these sources. These challenges can be naturally classified into different entangled issues regarding access to data, statistical methodology, quality, information technologies, and management. We identify the most relevant to be necessarily tackled before new data sources can be definitively considered fully incorporated into the production of official statistics.

Governance by Data

“…Illustrative of these shifts is the increasing use of (and widening aspirations to use) digital data to assemble official statistics at national and international scales, nurtured by initiatives such as the Global Working Group on Big Data for Official Statistics created by the UN Statistical Commission in 2015 (Daas et al 2015). Data employed for this purpose-some experimentally and some, in the case of supermarket scanner data, for instance, quite routinely in certain countries (Melser 2018)-include anonymized mobile phone data to assemble migration and tourism statistics, supermarket scanner data to help generate inflation statistics, satellite surface reflectance data to assemble agriculture statistics, and social media data to infer levels of consumer confidence for economic reporting purposes (Salgado & Oancea 2020). In such settings, conventional statistical populations, such as those made up of national survey respondents, are problematized, with emphasis laid on the expense, respondent burden, and lack of timeliness associated with conducting surveys (Cakici & Ruppert 2020).…”