A look into the future

The fact that the world is in continuous change and that new technologies are becoming widely available creates new opportunities and challenges for National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) worldwide. What if NSIs could access vast amounts of sophisticated data for free (or for a low cost) from enterprises? Could this facilitate the possibility for NSIs to disseminate more accurate indicators for the policy-makers and users, significantly reduce the response burden for companies, reduce costs for the NSIs and in the long run improve the living standards of the people in a country? The time has now come for NSIs to find the best practice to align legislation, regulations and practices in relation to scanner data and big data. Without common ground, the prospect of reaching consensus is unlikely. The discussions need to start with how to define quality. If NSIs define and approach quality differently, this will lead to a highly undesirable situation, as NSIs will move further away from harmonisation. Sweden was one of the leading countries that put these issues on the agenda for European cooperation; in 2012 Sweden implemented scanner data in the national Consumer Price Index after it was proven through research studies and statistical analyses that scanner data was significantly better than the manually collected data.