By BRIAN FALLOW
The new Government Statistician, Brian Pink, is mindful of the compliance costs on businesses of providing the raw information which is grist to Statistics New Zealand's mill.
"Compliance costs always have to be taken into account in any proposal to extend the statistical programme," said Mr Pink.
"It's the reason I feel it's very important to look at administrative data as an alternative to direct collection."
To limit the burden on the community of supplying information, statisticians have increasingly moved to using sample surveys.
But that approach in turn makes it difficult to meet the expectations of users of statistics to be able to delve into the data for more detail - for regional breakdowns, for example. The more survey-based data are disaggregated, the less reliable the results.
"We can't conjure data out of nothing," Mr Pink said.
So Statistics New Zealand is looking at ways of making more use of administration data already collected by other parts of the bureaucracy, such as the Inland Revenue or Customs.
Mr Pink succeeded Len Cook as Government Statistician a month ago after a career of more than 30 years at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
As well as balancing the interests of the suppliers and users of information, statisticians face other challenges arising from the accelerating pace of change in society and the economy.
For example, a growing proportion of economic activity is about the provision of services rather than the production of goods.
Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously observed that the gross domestic product of the United States probably weighed about the same today as it did 100 years ago.
Services are harder to measure. A higher proportion of firms are small or medium-sized and they tend to come and go more quickly.
Transactions are often electronic and many of them are difficult to track.
"These issues are exercising the minds of statistical organisations everywhere, and tax authorities for that matter," said Mr Pink.
"Is anyone on top of it? No."
New statistics chief has eye on compliance costs
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