Measuring the Statistical Capacity of Nations*

Abstract

The international development community has used the World Bank's Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews measurement methodologies, posits desired attributes, and presents theoretical and empirical frameworks to propose a new, improved index to monitor progress in the statistical capacity of nations. The paper illustrates the properties of the proposed index with global data from 2016. JEL Classification numbers: C8, H00, I00, O1. *We thank the editor James Fenske, four anonymous reviewers and participants at the World Congress of the International Statistical Institute (Kuala Lumpur) for useful feedback on earlier versions of the paper. We also thank Juderica Dias for helpful support with the data and Junhe Yang for capable research assistance. We are grateful to the UK Department of International Development for funding assistance through its Knowledge for Change (KCP) program and Strategic Research Program (SRP).1 Statistical capacity is usually interpreted as the ability of an NSS to meet user needs for relevant and good quality statistics in a timely manner. An NSS often consists of a number of different data-producing agencies and departments (such as the national statistical office, the central bank, and statistical departments within other line ministries), which renders the task of directly measuring statistical capacity a difficult one.

The Highways and Side Roads of Statistical Capacity Building

“…We replicate our analysis on the earlier version of SPI developed by Cameron et al (2021). Given the commonalities in design, both the SPI and the earlier version of the index are highly correlated (Figure A in the Appendix) and the analysis generates qualitatively similar results.…”

“…The prioritization of interventions requires a transparent and objective metric to compare countries' statistical capacity. The Statistical Performance Indicator (SPI), originally developed by Cameron et al (2021), facilitates such comparisons, both over time and across countries.…”

Statistical Performance Indicators and Index: A New Tool to Measure Country Statistical Capacity

“…The SPI is also built on a rigorous, axiomatic foundation that satisfies all the desiderata of a statistical capacity index: simple, coherent, motivated, rigorous, implementable, replicable, and incentive consistent (Cameron et al, 2021). 12 Table 2 shows that empirically, the SPI offers 51 indicators, which is more than twice the 25 indicators provided by the SCI.…”

“…Sanga, Dosso, and Gui-Diby (2011) discuss the technical framework behind the African Statistical Development Index. Most recently, Cameron et al (2021) propose a new theoretical framework for improving the SCI that discusses a statistical index's desirable characteristics and its technical foundations (including aggregation methods and axiomatic properties). Both these studies, however, provide limited discussion of the conceptual foundation regarding data usage and data production behind their indexes.…”

“…Both these studies, however, provide limited discussion of the conceptual foundation regarding data usage and data production behind their indexes. We address this limitation in this paper, and we build on the technical framework offered in Cameron et al (2021) to provide a new index that is both conceptually clearer and more comprehensive. 8 This paper consists of five sections.…”