Empowering Society by Reusing Privately-held Data for Official Statistics PDF Download

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ISBN: 9789276536000
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Official statistics are statistics provided by national and international statistical bodies as a public good, to everybody and for free. They are objective and impartial and comply with internationally agreed quality standards. They aim at providing high-quality information for policymakers and the citizens. Official statistics are essential for effective decision-making over a wide range of areas, from economic development to environmental measures, from social policies to emergency response and from public health to public services. They support informed decision-making and the general knowledge of wider society, evidence-based public debate and a democratic process that allows all stakeholders to participate on an equal footing. And they are essential for businesses' day-to-day operations and investment decisions. In short, official statistics are indispensable to well-functioning economies and democracies. Recent crises - from the financial crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine - have shown that there is no room for complacency. In our rapidly changing and increasingly data-driven society, there is a growing demand for better, more up-to-date and more detailed statistics. Providers of official statistics must therefore innovate and equip open societies with the tools they need to respond to an increasingly uncertain environment and the many associated challenges and opportunities. For instance, serious data gaps emerged during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. NextGenerationEU, the European Green Deal and other flagship EU policy programmes involve ambitious changes such as the green transition, the digital revolution and environmental challenges. Radical advances must be made in data supply and use, together with major investment in data production, data quality and metadata. The widening gap between what is expected from official statistics and what is currently delivered in practice requires vision, energy and urgent action. The world of official statistics is therefore undergoing profound transformation at national, EU and global level. The EU is playing a leading role in this context. It is a global leader in the promotion of personal data protection standards. It has undertaken a wide range of measures to upgrade its technological infrastructure. It has set ambitious, evidence-based and data-driven goals and targets in the areas of climate change and sustainable development, economic growth and stability, employment and social inclusion, and energy, food and health security. The European strategy for data has already produced a number of legislative acts including the Open Data Directive, the Data Governance Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. These will soon be joined by other legislation such as the Data Act. The challenges and opportunities considered in this report lie at the core of the EU's approach for developing official statistics. Statistics are still in practice largely based on data collected by surveys and administrative records rather than on the wealth of data which is held by private businesses and civil society organisations and which is powering the digital economy. The current data revolution provides unprecedented opportunities to collect, analyse and make use of new sources of data that can empower our economies and societies, improve decision-making and bring benefits for all members of society.