Principle 8- National Co-ordination

Coordination among statistical agencies within countries is essential to achieve consistency and efficiency in the statistical system.

Official statistics are broad in scope and are produced by many different government agencies in a country. In many countries there is a central or national statistical office that produces the greater share of official statistics, whereas in other countries there is more than one statistical agency handling different areas of statistics. In all cases, many official statistics are produced by government departments as a byproduct of their activities, sometimes by statistical units separately organized within them.

No matter what are the

organizational arrangements for producing statistics in a country,

co-ordination of statistical activities should be undertaken to avoid duplication of work, to

minimize reporting burden of respondents, to facilitate the integration of data from different sources through the use of

statistical standards and to participate in international initiatives. In many cases, the national statistics office or some other coordinating agency will need to take the lead in raising awareness of the Fundamental Principles by all agencies producing official statistics and the benefits of co-ordination of statistical activities.

In some countries there is active management of the national statistical system through development of all professional statistical staff and the sharing of software, data, registers etc. Co-ordination requirements in some countries are specified in

statistics legislation .