In the period from 28 March till 1 April 2022 the third in row Peer review of the National Statistical System (NSS) of Bulgaria will be held within its membership in the European Statistical system (ESS). All ESS members are subject to peer reviews, incl. Eurostat, the national statistical systems of the EU Member States, and of the countries of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The period when the peer reviews of the whole European Statistical system will be held is from 2021 by 2023.
In each ESS member country, besides the national statistical office, between 3 and 6 other national authorities are also reviewed – bodies which also collect, produce and distribute official European statistics. In Bulgaria in the Third peer review besides the National Statistical Institute, also administrative units are included within the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environment and Waters and The National Social Security Institute.
The peer review is aimed at assessing the compliance of the national policies and practices in the statistics field with the principles of the European Statistics Code of Practice – a document which ensures the quality of the official data. The Code comprises 16 key principles which cover the institutional environment, the statistical processes and the statistical outputs, as well as a set of 84 indicators for assessment of the implemented practices and standards.
The methodology of the peer review is uniform for Eurostat and all ESS member countries and includes elements of audit. First, NSI and the selected other national authorities fill in a comprehensive self-assessment questionnaire and they submit documents for implementing the Code principles in their practice as evidence for their answers. The questionnaires and the documents are checked and analyzed by an expert team including 4 experts in statistics, audit and management, assigned by means of a special procedure by the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board (ESGAB). There is a Eurostat representative in each review team. After the initial assessment, the team visits the respective country where it carries out more exhaustive review and meets with a wide circle of stakeholders, incl. government, business, media, social partners, academia representatives, etc. Finally, the review team compiles a final report with recommendations, on which NSI elaborates a plan for further improvement actions in compliance with the recommendations.
The peer review for Bulgaria is guided by Ms. Marjo Bruun, until recently Director General of the Statistics Office of Finland. Ms. Bruun was a member of the ESS Partnership Group in 2014 and 2015. She co-chaired the Task Force for ESS Vision 2.0 in 2014. She was a member of the Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians and its Chair from 2016 till 2021.
The other team members are:
- Kees Zeelenberg – he has been working for 30 years in the Statistics Office of the Netherlands. He has a degree in econometrics and a doctorate in economics, and is an author or co-author of more than 50 articles and books on econometrics and statistics. He has been Director of Methodology and Quality Department for long years.
- Jordi del Bas – he is economist by education and deals with projects for development in the private sector by profession. He is senior accredited trainer in assessment to the Secretariat General of the European Commission. He has also worked as senior independent assessor for international organisations (European Commission, several UN and World Bank agencies) in more than 50 countries in the world.
- Helena Ottosson – she has devoted her entire professional career to the European Union since Sweden joined it in 1995. Ms. Ottosson is a jurist by education, interested in languages. She had worked in the Court of the European Union as a jurist linguist for 10 years before moving to the European Commission and Eurostat. Now she is Head of the Legal Department of Eurostat.
Observer of the Peer Review in Bulgaria is Ms. Claudia Junker who is Head of Task Force "Peer Reviews and quality" at Eurostat.
