Page 265 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS493 Irene S.
Jarmin (2019). The Netherlands show a similar trend compared to the
international decrease in willingness to participate in social surveys, and the
necessity of burden reduction for the business statistics. New methods and
improvements of the data collection strategy are required, giving rise to a major
change in one of the most important parts of the production process: data
collection. As extensively deliberated by Groves (2017) and Bean (2016) there is
broad agreement on the need to transform from a survey-centric model to a
model that blends structured survey data with administrative and unstructured
alternative data sources. The use of administrative data is characterized by its
versatile applications. This paper deals with these various aspects of the use of
administrative data in the production of official social and business statistics at
CBS. In the following paragraphs, examples are given for its use in the
replacement of survey data (2.1), facilitating the creation of new information
products and more detailed statistics (2.2), better approach of target populations
(2.3) and in establishing and improving population backbones (2.4). To make the
most of it new methods on combining data need to be explored (2.5) as well as
new technological developments (2.6). The increasing use of administrative data
also creates new job types (2.7) and influences the organisation of NSI’s itself in
relation to data owners (2.8).

2. Aspects concerning the use of administrative data
2.1 Administrative data in official statistics
Since the mid-1990s, wherever possible CBS has switched from the system
of conducting sample surveys to assembling data from the administrative
sources of other public institutions and using the existing data in those
registers rather than collecting the data it needed by distributing
questionnaires. The Dutch census being a fine example of a population census
for which no additional data collection is needed (0 enumerators). By bringing
together all available data sources, combining registers and surveys a virtual
census is conducted (https://youtu.be/SLpDkcyenf0).
The Statistics Netherlands Act required CBS to minimise the administrative
burden it caused and at the same time provided for the use of government
registers by CBS for statistical purposes. A second impulse on increased
availability and use of government registers was in the year 2000 when the
Dutch government launched the project “Streamlining Administrative Data” in
which the infrastructure was developed to store administrative information in a
network of so called basic registers. This administrative system of basic registers
is part of the Generic Data Infrastructure (GDI) and is governed by the National
Commissioner for Digital Government (https://www.nldigitalgovernment.nl).
This network aims for better governmental service to the public and business
sector. The basic idea is that citizens and businesses provide only once their
personal information to a governmental body. Each basic register keeps its own

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