According to the provisions of article 5a of Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics and article 5 of the Official Statistics Law of 2021 (Law No. 25(Ι)/2021), the Director of of the Statistical Service shall set guidelines, where this is necessary, to ensure quality in the development, production and dissemination of official statistics within the National Statistical System (NSS) and monitor and review their implementation; while being responsible for ensuring compliance with those guidelines solely within the Statistical Service.
To this end, CYSTAT:
- Coordinates the activities of the NSS regarding the development, production and dissemination of official statistics.
- Coordinates the implementation of the European Statistics Code of Practice within the NSS.
- Produces quality guidelines, to ensure quality in the development, production and dissemination of all official statistics within the NSS.
- Monitors and reviews the implementation of the European Statistics Code of Practice and the quality guidelines by the members of the NSS.
- Provides consultation and guidance regarding any standards, classifications and methodologies that have to be applied when producing harmonised official / European statistics.
- Provides means for establishing principles and methods of producing reliable official statistics of high quality by the NSS.
Additionally, in the framework of its coordination role regarding official statistics, the Statistical Service invites the other national authorities to designate an official as statistical head, who shall have the responsibility of implementing, among others, the statistical principles and quality guidelines for ensuring the quality of official statistics.
Quality Criteria
Official statistics are developed, produced and disseminated on the basis of uniform European standards and of harmonised methods, in order to guarantee the quality of the results and, in this respect, the Statistical Service and the other national authorities apply the criteria for the evaluation of statistical quality. The quality criteria as defined in Article 12, paragraph 1 of Regulation (EC) No 223/2009, are the following:
1. Relevance, which refers to the degree to which statistics meet current and potential needs of the users.
2. Accuracy, which refers to the closeness of estimates to the unknown true values.
3. Timeliness, which refers to the period between the availability of the information and the event or phenomenon it describes.
4. Punctuality, which refers to the delay between the date of the release of the data and the target date (the date by which the data should have been delivered).
5. Accessibility and clarity, which refer to the conditions and modalities by which users can obtain, use and interpret data.
6. Comparability, which refers to the measurement of the impact of differences in applied statistical concepts, measurement tools and procedures where statistics are compared between geographical areas, sectoral domains or over time.
7. Coherence, which refers to the adequacy of the data to be reliably combined in different ways and for various uses.
Statistical Principles
In order to ensure the quality of official statistics, there is a set of statistical principles that must be implemented during the production of statistics. Specifically, the development, production and dissemination of official statistics must be be governed by the statistical principles of professional independence, impartiality, objectivity, reliability, statistical confidentiality and cost effectiveness, as defined in Article 2(1) of Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 and are further elaborated in the European Statistics Code of Practice.
Statistical principles to be in force during the statistical production process:
1. Professional independence, meaning that statistics must be developed, produced and disseminated in an independent manner, particularly as regards the selection of techniques, definitions, methodologies and sources to be used, and the timing and content of all forms of dissemination, and that the performance of those tasks is free from any pressures from political or interest groups or from Union or national authorities;
2. Impartiality, meaning that statistics must be developed, produced and disseminated in a neutral manner, and that all users must be given equal treatment;
3. Objectivity, meaning that statistics must be developed, produced and disseminated in a systematic, reliable and unbiased manner; it implies the use of professional and ethical standards, and that the policies and practices followed are transparent to users and survey respondents;
4. Reliability, meaning that statistics must measure as faithfully, accurately and consistently as possible the reality that they are designed to represent and implying that scientific criteria are used for the selection of sources, methods and procedures;
5. Statistical confidentiality, meaning the protection of confidential data related to single statistical units which are obtained directly for statistical purposes or indirectly from administrative or other sources and implying the prohibition of use for non-statistical purposes of the data obtained and of their unlawful disclosure;
6. Cost effectiveness, meaning that the costs of producing statistics must be in proportion to the importance of the results and the benefits sought, that resources must be optimally used and the response burden minimised. The information requested shall, where possible, be readily extractable from available records or sources.