Cooperation with UNSD
Official statistics are playing an increasing role in our societies and governments. High quality statistical data are now readily available at the national, regional and global levels. They are routinely used in public debate, policy formulation and business decisions. National statistical systems that have been charged with the compilation and the dissemination of official statistics have evolved to become an important national institution in each and every country.
The adoption of the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics by the Statistical Commission in 1994 has been a milestone in the codification and the promotion of the basic values in official statistics. These principles contain and promote, among others, such core values as relevance, impartiality, professional standards and ethics, accountability and transparency.
The long and outstanding collaboration of national statistical systems has also led to the formation of a global statistical system whose members use a common language to share their experiences and to advance official statistics at the global level. One of the major achievements of official statistics at the global level has been the development of international methods and standards, which has ultimately enabled an international data collection and sharing platform through the application of such methods and standards at the national level and the subsequent production of comparable data at the regional and international levels.
To celebrate these and the many more achievements of official statistics, the United Nations Statistics Division proposed to celebrate the World Statistics Day.
World Statistics Day is proposed as a one-off event, building on the many national and regional traditions of having celebratory events of this nature, highlighting particularly the cooperation of statisticians around the world within the global statistical system.
At its forty-first session, the Statistical Commission, proposed to celebrate the first World Statistics Day on 20 October 2010. As a result of the success of this first celebration of World Statistics Day in 2010, the Commission, at its forty-third session, in March 2012, confirmed the recommendation of its Bureau that World Statistics Day be celebrated every five years.