The European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) published 18 recommendations for Eurostat
The European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB) published the results of its peer review of Eurostat including 18 concrete recommendations. It also urged EU policy makers to ensure that the independence and impartiality of European Statistics will not be compromised by the threats to the rule of law. The results of its peer review of Eurostat is a part of 2021 ESGAB annual report.
This peer review of Eurostat, the third of its kind, reflects – in addition to an evaluation of the adherence to the European Statistics Code of Practice (ES CoP) – the need to rise to the new opportunities and challenges with a focus that is clearly put on adapting to the future.
“Eurostat has made significant progress over a range of criteria that are relevant for the production of high-quality European statistics, especially as regards the ability to maintain regular statistical production and enhance the production of experimental statistics during the pandemic. This bears testimony to a substantial agility of Eurostat and of the whole European Statistical System”, as the Chair of ESGAB, Aurel Schubert, summarised.
Accordingly, the emphasis of the present review has been mostly on how best to adapt to the new and emerging data landscape. Eurostat has progressed a lot in this regard but a number of additional initiatives would need to be taken.
ESGAB is of the opinion that Eurostat should be a role model in the ESS, extend its cooperation with users and partners, expand its production possibilities frontier, and be agile and proactive. ESGAB presents in this report 18 concrete recommendations to achieve those goals.
In particular, the recommendations refer to developing a comprehensive strategy of cooperation with academia, facilitating access to microdata for analytical purposes while developing privacy-protecting techniques, as well as expanding the frontiers of European official statistics through innovation and experimental statistics based on new data sources and modeling techniques. ESGAB also recommends that Eurostat further improves the dissemination and communication of data and statistics in the light of the “new world of information overflow”, including through publishing information on data revision policy.
