The President of the NSI Assoc. Prof. Atanas Atanasov, PhD participated in a meeting of the heads of the statistical authorities of the European Statistical System (ESS) member states, organized in the framework of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU. The aim of the meeting, that took place in Warsaw, was to discuss the implementation of the amendments and new additions to the main European regulation in the field of statistics – Regulation 223/2009.
As was expected, the discussions covered different aspects of access to privately held data, from a legal, operational and practical standpoint. The talks focused on defining strategies for implementing new data access provisions and cooperation mechanisms between statistical authorities and private data holders. Good practices and examples from the business sector on accessing and using privately held data and its potential application in various statistical fields such as smart meter data, web data, payment transactions data, and mobile data were discussed. Last but not least, the expected results of such applications (such as improving timeliness) were put forward.
The discussions also included the actions that need to be undertaken at the EU level in order to implement the new access to data provisions, legal and ethical considerations and the issues relating to ensuring the quality of private database sources and problems with the data transfer infrastructure.
Such meetings provide participants with the opportunity to exchange experiences and ideas, as well as to develop a common approach to addressing current and potential future challenges facing European statistics.
The achieved results of the High Level Meeting will be discussed during the upcoming meeting of the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC), which will take place in May 2025, where further step are to be defined for the implementation of the revised Regulation 223/2009 on European statistics.
