Quality assurance framework

Quality Declaration of European Statistical System shortly summarises quality requirements for European Statistical System.

European Statistics Code of Practice is the cornerstone of the common quality framework of the European Statistical System and a self-regulatory instrument. It is aimed at establishing public trust in European statistics and it defines 16 general principles and corresponding indicators for developing, producing and disseminating statistics. These principles are covering institutional environment, statistical processes and statistical outputs. 

United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics are a pillar of the Global Statistical System. Ten general principles regulate official statistics and are applicable in national statistical systems and institutes in daily work.

Recommendations of the OECD Council on Good Statistical Practice summarise general requirements for quality in statistics available in various documents, thus helping OECD countries to present their statistics compliant with the OECD requirements. Twelve recommendations generally meet the United Nations core principles for statistics and provisions of the European Statistics Code of Practice.

The National Statistical System of Latvia (hereinafter – NSS of Latvia) is established by statistical institutions and the Statistical Council. The managing institution of the NSS of Latvia is the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (hereinafter – the CSB), which implements functional subordination over other statistical institutions in the field of production of official statistics, providing methodological guidelines, by supervising the conformity of production of official statistics with the laws and regulations, and also by issuing orders that are required to produce official statistics.

To ensure that NSS of Latvia has common principles and requirements, CSB has developed the Quality Policy of the National Statistical System of Latvia and imposed total quality requirements for statistical institutions which are based on European Statistics Code of Practice.

For implementation of Quality Policy of the NSS of Latvia, the CSB has developed a Memorandum of Understanding (in Latvian), by which the statistical institutions confirm their commitment to implementing and promoting quality standards in their statistical institutions.

The Quality Policy of CSB consists of the CSB's vision, mission, core values and commitment to meet the requirements, follow good practice and ensure continuous improvement. The quality policy is designed and implemented in accordance with the CSB strategy and the action plan.

Statistical dissemination policy defines general principles of statistical data dissemination, availability of CSB`s products and services for data users, communication with data users, cooperation with the media, availability of individual data for scientific and educational purposes.

Revision policy is an important component of good governance practice addressed  more and more often in the international statistical society.The objective of the Revision policy is to lay down the order of review or revision of the prepared and published data.

Revision is review of any published statistical data, regardless of the fact, whether the data are distributed electronically (in publicly available data bases or in press releases of CSB or in printed form (CSB publications)).

The first chapter of the present document explains the terms applied in the Revision policy, the second chapter characterises shortly the CSB revision policy, whereas the third chapter stipulates the revision cycle of the statistical data prepared by the CSB

Since 2016 the CSB has been evaluating the compliance of statistical institutions of Latvia with general quality requirements.

The results of assessment carried out in 2023 show that, on average, 91 % of the requirements are fully implemented in institutions, 7 % are partially implemented and 2 % are not implemented. The unimplemented requirements are mainly related to the (un) availability of data, metadata and statistics publication calendar on the official statistics portal.