The Statistics Bill for Myanmar
appeared in Kye-Mon (The Mirror) daily in three parts on November
19-21, 2016. As a statistician of sorts in a government agency
(actually we dealt mostly with administrative records) a long time
ago, I was interested in statistical systems and had read a bit of
works in the Journal of Official Statistics and absorbed some
knowledge about official statistics and its organization through the
earlier version of the Handbook of Statistical Organization by the
United Nations. By the time I had left my job as a government
employee and became a dabbler in statistics in the Pacific and then
in Jakarta after that, Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics
by the United Nations Statistical Commission had came out and by the
nature of my work I got a bit familiar with it.
With this background, when I started
reading the Statistics Bill, I've taken for granted that the subject
matter of the Bill will be the domain of “Official Statistics”
and its organization as envisaged in those two UN documents and those
which grown out of them. After-all, has not the opening paragraphs of
the Handbook
stated its conviction as:
The
two main intended audiences for the Handbook of Statistical
Organization, Third Edition: The Operation and Organization of a
Statistical Agency are: (a) the chief statistician (or soon to be
chief statistician of a statistical agency) and his or her
colleagues; and (b) those charged with oversight of the official
statistics function.
As
the heads of agencies, those who hold these positions are both
formally and emotionally committed to continuity of a tradition
embodied by the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
Nevertheless I was puzzled by the
choice of wording used in the Statistics Bill:
Within the context of that paragraph, I
felt that the marked text above would stand for “official
statistics”. In Myanmar language the wording "တရားဝင်"
is taken to mean lawful or legal or legitimate in common usage. For
example this is from English-Myanmar Dictionary (Third Printing) by
Myanmar Language Commission:
So it looks as if the Bill has adopted
a common usage translation of “official” with a connotation very
different from “official statistics” taken as a whole.
Unfortunately, the dictionary doesn't include “Official Statistics”
which is a technical term having a specific meaning and as such could
be overlooked even in such a big volume of 1,621 pages or other
standard dictionaries. However we could find Wikipedia defining
Official Statistics as:
Official
statistics are
statistics
published
by government
agencies
or other public bodies such as international organizations as a
public good. ... This bulk of data is usually called official
statistics.
Anyway, to please those who are
skeptical of any citation involving Wikipedia, here is the definition
from an authoritative source (Committee for the Coordination of
Statistical Activities SA/2012/3, Nineteenth Session 21 February
2012):
What
is official statistics?
Official
statistics is defined in the SDMX Content‐oriented Guidelines as
“any statistical activity
carried
out within a national statistical system, or under the statistical
programme of an
intergovernmental
organization”. However, this is a rather circular definition and it
is not widely
recognized
outside the statistical community. Different interpretations may
occur for statistics
produced
by governmental and public agencies outside national statistical
systems (which may or
may
not follow standard statistical practices and principles), or for
statistics produced as
collaborative
efforts between statistical offices and other institutes (NGOs,
research institutes,
public
sector).
The
key question is what makes statistics as “official”. The label
“official” can be based on the
characteristics
of the actors and institutions (the source) or on the characteristics
of the process.
Few
countries clearly define official statistics by law. For example the
UK Statistics and Registration
Service
Act (2007) defines official statistics as “all those statistical
outputs produced by the UK
Statistics
Authority’s executive office (the Office for National Statistics),
by central Government
departments
and agencies, by the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland,
Scotland and
Wales,
and by other Crown bodies (over 200 bodies in total)”1. At
international level, there is not
an
universally accepted definition of official statistics. Outside of
the statistical system, agencies
which
focus on thematic areas, may have a different connotation of official
statistics from the one
included
in the SDMX Guidelines identifying official statistics as any data
provided by
representatives
of member states (which may not have a close relationship with
national statistical
systems1).
Another
key question is "do available official statistics exhaust the
domain of relevant economic
and
social information, or does it exist additional sources of good
quality data that complement
official
ones, or provide information not produced by national statistical
offices? In modern
societies,
an increasing amount of information is produced by non‐official
organizations, which
may
even include in their routine activities the production of
specialized statistics, produced by
professional
statisticians or derived from their own administrative registers.
Very
often the paradigm to elevate official statistics at a higher level
is based on the assumption
that
official statistics is most solid, complete, and independent. This
can be true for many countries
and
several areas, but it is not universally true. In countries where the
statistical process is not
transparent,
statistics on areas that are highly politically sensitive and
relatively “young” in terms
of
existing statistical standards (for example environment, food
security, poverty, crime, drug
trafficking,
….) official or government statistics may not always meet the
highest quality standards.
Development
of guidelines/best practices on the use of non‐official
data
Follow
up note
from
the Task Team composed by: UNODC (chair), Eurostat, IMF, ITU, The
World Bank,UNECE1,
UNESCAP, UNHabitat, UNIDO, WTO
Available here.
Then a drastically simplified
definition of official statistics may be given as: “statistics
produced by government and related bodies”. So shall we not call it
simply “ အစိုးရစာရင်းအင်း”
or “အစိုးရနှင့်၊အစိုးရမိတ်ဖက်
စာရင်းအင်း”
or anything to that effect? I don't know if the wording
“တရားဝင်”
is meant to be value laden as the law/legal/legitimate
qualifier for the word “statistics”. If so the third and
fourth paragraphs of the preceding excerpt legitimately questions
this notion. Then shouldn't we go non-committal in the wording
and let users and public decide the merits of our work afterwards?
Additionally, here is how a National
Statistical Authority defines National Statistics accommodating the
needs of changing times:
What are ‘National Statistics’?
‘National
Statistics’ are a subset of official statistics which have been
certified by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its Code
of Practice for Official Statistics. The label currently comprise
three basic types:
- legacy ‘National Statistics’ – those statistical products which obtained their designation as ‘National Statistics’ before April 2008, in accordance with the arrangements set out in the ‘Framework for National Statistics’ (2000) and which have retained their status, but which have not yet been formally re-assessed by the UK Statistics Authority for compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. The Assessment Programme began in November 2008.
- re-assessed ‘National Statistics’ – any statistical product which has retained its National Statistics status after a formal re-assessment by the Statistics Authority of compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.
- new ‘National Statistics’ – any statistical product which has been proposed by ministers as a candidate ‘National Statistics’ which has been subject to its first formal assessment by the UK Statistics Authority and which, as a result, has been granted accreditation by the Statistics Authority.
No comments:
Post a Comment