Discussion

These five articles and the framework proposed by Eltinge, Biemer, and Holmberg illuminate an exciting view of the future of official statistics. The articles are innovative, forward-looking, and remarkably complementary to one another. Below, for brevity, I refer to the five articles as the NASS, StatsNL, StatsNZ, RTI and Westat/NCHS articles. I will comment on each article individually, on them collectively in the context of the framework, and on the entire concept of “systems and architectures for high-quality statistics production.” First, however, I present two complementary perspectives on official statistics.