Page 296 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS496 Mario P.R.
At the same time NSOs are under tremendous pressure to improve and to
protect their work. They face accelerating demands for faster and more
disaggregated information, meanwhile globalization requires them to
respond to emerging needs of internationally comparable statistics (e.g.
monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals -SDGs-), and the
unparalleled changes in technology, challenges them to integrate external
sources of information (such as Big Data) into their production of information.
Additionally, they face increasing competition from private data providers, as
well as the extension of fake news and misinformation campaigns which
requires them to publicly defend the use of accurate official statistics.
This paper, however, focuses in one additional and more political
challenge that NSOs face and that sometimes we may risk not noticing: the
threat of political interference from their own national governments. Despite
the international endorsement of the Fundamental Principles of Official
2
Statistics (FPOS) and the advancement in the institutional governance of
NSOs, there are worrying examples from around the world of governments
undermining the professional independence of NSOs and threatening the
integrity of official statisticians.
The cases of Andreas Georgiou – former President of ELSTAT (Greece’s
NSO), prosecuted by the Greek government for the alleged crime of inflating
3
the 2009 Greek fiscal debt and deficit figures (IAOS, 2018)- and Anar
Meshimbayeva -former Chairperson of the Kazakh Agency of Statistics,
accused of artificially inflating the costs of the 2009 population census’
materials, sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment and condemned to pay the
state over 1.5 million USD (Baer, 2018)- are just two examples that add to other
instances in which there have been attempts to politically interfere in the work
of NSOs and undermine their independence.
Some of these cases are Argentina -where political intervention in the
processes and results of inflation data produced by INDEC (Argentina’s NSO)
led the IMF to issue a declaration of censure on its Consumer Price Index and
Gross Domestic Product official data in 2012, which was removed until 2016
once important remedial measures to improve the quality of the data were
implemented-;4 Canada -where the government eliminated the mandatory
4
long-form census in 2010 and replaced it with a voluntary household survey
despite the warnings of its Chief Statistician (who resigned over the issue) of
the consequences in the quality of the data (The Globe and Mail, 2014)-; and

2 The FPOS were approved unanimously by the member States of the United Nations General
Assembly on 29 January 2014.
3 More information on Andreas Georgiou’s case can be found in: (Aizenman, et al., 2017);
(Walker, 2017); (Bloomberg, 2017); and (The Economist, 2016).
4 (The Economist, 2014) and (The Economist, 2017). For the IMF statements on Argentina, see
(IMF, 2012) and (IMF, 2016).
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