Statistics need to be relevant and current to maintain public trust and confidence, and should reflect the society, economy, and environment in Aotearoa that we are trying to measure, Stats NZ said today.
"We know that customers make important decisions using our insights and statistics so high-quality data is important to them and us," Insights and Statistics Deputy Government Statistician Rachael Milicich said.
"Decisions that affect interest rates, health funding, and even where to build schools all rely on independent and trusted data from Stats NZ."
COVID-19 has been a challenging time for everyone, and data has been at the heart of important decisions. Stats NZ had to adapt and change measures, models, and assumptions to reflect the reality of what was happening in Aotearoa during COVID-19.
Face-to-face interviewing paused when COVID-19 made it unsafe to survey New Zealanders in their homes, and this has affected the quality of some of our measures, such as child poverty.
"Stats NZ was able to release new timely insights into border crossings, overseas trade, and employment when it was needed," Milicich said. "Now we want to know what our customers' current needs for data are."
Most of the weekly data series that were developed to understand the impact of COVID-19 have recently ceased as customers are using them less. High-quality statistics for decision-making is a consistent requirement, although customer needs are continually shifting and changing. Stats NZ is also looking to reduce content that is no longer fit for purpose or has become obsolete. This will allow us to shift more resources towards improving data quality.
International standards that underpin a lot of the statistics and insights that Stats NZ produces are changing. New standards will further integrate the environment and wellbeing into economic frameworks and reflect products like cryptocurrency that didn't exist at the time of the last major updates.
"The world doesn't stand still and neither do statistics. The new international standards reflect what is important to people, such as climate change, distribution of wealth to different groups, and the digital economy," Milicich said.
We will be consulting in early 2023 to make sure customer priorities are reflected in the changes we plan to make to our data insights. We also want to find out about the relevance of our statistics to customers.
There are two key initiatives that we will work on with our customers:
- February 2023 - Consulting on Measuring an inclusive and sustainable economy by looking at potential data improvements, the opportunities from adopting the new international standards, and the datasets that we will potentially need to source and adapt to support these standards. This consultation will also allow us to understand the needs of current and future of our customers and what their priorities are.
- June 2023 - Release of an upgraded version of NZ.Stat to replace the existing tool, which will subsequently be decommissioned. We will then talk to customers about the approach to replace Infoshare.
Risk Warning: Cryptocurrency is a unregulated virtual notoriously volatile instrument with a high level of risk. Any news, opinions, research, data, or other information contained within this website is provided for news reporting purposes as general market commentary and does not constitute investment or trading advice.
