Page 42 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS178 Barend de Beer
with indicators reflecting the adherence to the Fundamental Principles of
Official Statistics related to the use, relevance, quality, and transparency
of statistics.
 Subjective” indicators derived from user satisfaction surveys: Gauge
the value of statistics in terms of the confidence and trust in the statistics
reported by the stakeholders in the 3rd component of the SEF, focusing
on the usefulness and accessibility of the compiled statistics. Use of
dedicated user satisfaction surveys which could be conducted annually or
bi-annually is recommended.
 Methodologies to value/monetise the value of statistics:
Notwithstanding the usefulness of the first two methods of value
proposition assessment, a 3rd and very powerful method would be the
ability to put a monetary value on statistics or at least the impact of the
compiled statistics. In order to measure this, the following two methods,
amongst others, can be considered:
 Cost based approaches: In this approach the cost of producing the
statistics is calculated. One application of this approach is to infer that
the value that a community is willing to pay for the production of
statistics reflects the value it attributes to the statistics. Although this
is a relatively straight forward method it has drawbacks as it does not
take differences in productivity and quality into account when
comparing data over time or across countries. This methodology also
implies that if cost equals value then central banks could merely spend
more on statistics to enhance the value obtained from it, which is not
necessarily the case. It would however be advisable to compute such a
value and also express it in current prices so as to gauge whether
investment in statistics is growing in real terms.
 Market (equivalent) pricing: In this method, the goal is to approximate
the market price of the produced statistics by considering the market
prices of similar products transacted in a competitive market and use
that as a proxy.
Finally, it is important to know more about potential stakeholders who
presently are not using statistics. Interest should not only lie in the current
value of statistics, but also the greater potential value to non-users. This raises
some obvious questions: 1) Why are these stakeholder groups not using
produced statistics? 2) Is it because they are not aware of the available
statistics? or 3) Is the value proposition not appealing enough or 4) Is the
statistics not generated in the most appealing format or correctly timed? In
addition to understanding the stakeholder groups that are not currently
consuming the produced statistics, it would also serve the Bank well to
improve its knowledge on what kind of statistics is required due to changing

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