Page 241 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS224 Jorge T. et al.
Secondly, even with legal autonomy, the question arises as to the
Institute's scope of operation. Considerations on this matter may be
generically extended to other national statistical offices (NSO). In our view,
there is no doubt that in a presidential system (such is the political
organisation of Argentina) NSOs must operate within the scope of the
Executive Branch. The creation of a sphere independent from the three
branches of Government, as in the case of Mexico, is difficult to implement
and is worthy of an analysis that exceeds the scope of these notes.
A direct link with the Executive Branch may give rise to certain degree of
tension. The institutional structure of an NSO should therefore include
effective coordination powers on this matter.
In other words, having full autonomy without an effective bridge with the
Executive Branch entails the risk of isolating the statistical system from
government policies. This might eventually lead to a breach of the principle of
public policies based on evidence.
To avoid this, there must be a strong institutional will, firmly installed at
the political level. Such a remark may be redundant for mature democratic
systems, but this is not the case in many countries.
A good coordination between the Executive Branch and the NSO also leads
to better chances of meeting the interests of users. In a way, there can always
be transactional situations that result in disadvantages for an NSO (and its
users) when budget allocations are decided.
The third unavoidable matter is defining to which area of the Executive
Branch the NSO should belong. A brief review of the Argentine experience
offers certain considerations that may be useful. The law by which INDEC was
created was issued in 1968, when the country was under a military
administration. The law was therefore not approved by Congress, which was
dissolved at the time, but by the President of the Republic, invested with
legislative powers by the founding acts of the military after the 1966 coup. It
is a rather strange case. The law abolished all previous fragmented legislation
and created an institute under rather modern canons, delegating regulatory
powers over official national statistics and creating a National Statistical
System. Its creation was led by a prestigious statistician at the time, but it was
not accompanied by the public debates that these foundational actions
usually require. Neither did the press register the sanction of the law or the
complementary regulations that followed. Although the law did not give
autonomy to the Institute, INDEC functioned with few disturbances until the
political intervention that took place during the 2007-2015 period. Until then,
the Institute had been professionally respected and had become one of the
most prestigious institutions in the country. It also participated actively in the
international statistical community.

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