Page 407 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4

CPS2460 Mustafa Dinc et al.
standards and Codes of Practice required as part of membership to
these organizations.
• To assess the statistical performance of countries on a global scale as
Global Public Goods in terms of the scope of data products;
compliance with international standards; periodicity, timeliness and
the accessibility of results.
Over the years, a number of tools and approaches have been developed
utilizing certain type of questionnaires to be completed by staff from national
statistical system or by experts recruited for this purpose. The assessment
process takes place in the country with involvement of external experts and
relevant staff from the national statistical system. Such assessments are
country specific and could provide a deeper and better understanding of the
national statistical system, but this process is costly, time consuming and often
imposes additional burden on already weak capacity of statistical systems. It
could also result in different interpretation of questions and hence different
answers that, in turn, could make international comparison difficult.
The SPI is one of these tools that provides a globally consistent and
comparable assessment of country statistical systems by focusing on a smaller
set of indicators and using publicly available information.
Irrespective of the specific purpose, interventions derived from SPI
assessments have the same long-term objective – a national statistical system
that should be able to sustainably collect, analyze, and disseminate high-
quality data about its population and economy to inform evidence-based
policy making and monitoring and evaluating development programs.
Resource-intensive country assessments lack cross-country comparability
and difficult to summarize. Moreover, given the degree of subjectivity
associated with in-depth assessments, different assessors could arrive at a
different overall summary.
Given the difficulties of synthesizing detailed assessments to determine
progress on a global scale, there is an understandable desire to form a single
composite index drawing from publicly available information. The SPI in
conjunction with Country Statistical Profiles provide the means to compare
countries and to track performance over time.

3. The Statistical Performance Index (SPI)
The SPI framework is designed to capture different aspects of national
statistical capacity by employing most relevant and representative variables
that are publicly available. The SPI can be used to gauge statistical
performance of individual countries over time or cross-country comparisons
of performance at a point in time.
The SPI aims to provide an objective, justifiable/verifiable assessment of
the statistical performance of countries over time by using publicly available

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