Minister urges public participation to improve data

Marco Archer, Minister for Finance and Economic Development

(CNS): The minister of finance and economic development stressed the importance of accurate statistics on Tuesday as he urged the community to actively contribute to the improvement of official figures in the Cayman Islands. Marco Archer said official statistics are public goods and while better data requires resources, his ministry was working on more ways to accurately measure life in Cayman. In a message for the World Statistics Day celebrations he said more money has been budgeted to improve data collection.

In addition to the introduction of two Labour Force Survey (LFS) per year and the 2015  household survey over the next two years, the Economics and Statistics Office (ESO) will implement new survey instruments to pave the way for developing the proper tool to measure the multi-sector economic impact of private and public spending, Archer said.

“In all these initiatives, the contribution of households and businesses as sources of data cannot be emphasized enough. I am pleased to note that households in Cayman have been responding extremely well to the surveys, generating a response rate that is considered one of the highest in the region,” he said.

However, he warned this was not the case in the business sector. “Although it has gradually improved over the years, the response rate for the business surveys falls short of the household surveys.”

Recognizing the issue of confidentiality raised by the business sector, he said the current confidentiality accorded to all survey data in the Statistics Law (2011 Revision) conforms with best practice internationally and, he added, survey data collected under the same Law is exempt from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Archer pointed out that accurate data can be used not just by government but also the private sector and is the most apolitical way to understand society. He also said that official statistics facilitate good governance by measuring and reporting on the overall fiscal performance of governments on one end, and the socio-economic conditions of various sectors impacted directly or indirectly by government policies on the other end.