Cost accounting in the ESS Policy Group on Statistical Cooperation 13-14 October 2016, Zadar, Croatia Cost accounting in the ESS Point 8 of the Agenda

Contents New public management Merits and costs Definitions Projects in ESS Enlargement countries Questions to you

New Public Management Transparency Inform the citizens Efficiency gains in the public sector Better use of public resources Support decisions of an NSI Basis for budget requests with sound arguments Priority-setting

Merits and costs Estimate human and financial resources by statistical product Direct costs: statistical output by production units Indirect costs: auxiliary and supporting services in NSI Merits: each statistical product ranked by "focus groups" in high/medium/low merit (or benefit or usefulness). 15/70/15 distribution

Necessary definitions Standardised catalogue of statistical products Include regional offices of NSI Include Other National Authorities for statistical production (ONA) Human resources – time registration or other estimate of full time equivalent Include temporary staff, interviewers, enumerators etc. Include outsourcing in financial cost (not human resource?) Monetary value of merits/benefits (no market price) Method to allocate indirect costs to statistical products Non-regular expenditures (decennial census; research project)

2 cost accounting projects in ESS Cost assessment survey of production of statistics in EU MS and EFTA countries First survey launched May 2015 – data for 2010-2014 collected from NSIs Shortcomings in the survey methodology; results not released 11 MS worked on methodology Second round of survey 2016, covers 2012-2015, NSIs, ONAs NSIs send back questionnaire Sep 2016, Eurostat presents April 2017 Cost analysis of European statistics by product Eurostat made cost-merit survey in 2014 Pilot on costs for 2015 with 11 EU Member States and 8 statistical products Six NSIs sent cost estimates to Eurostat Decision end-2016 if the 11 NSIs should also estimate merits Phase 2: all ESS countries, 25 products, direct and indirect costs, ONAs

Enlargement countries The survey on costs for production of official statistics was sent also to enlargement countries in Sep 2015 You sent back overviews with number of staff and costs for 2010-2014 Some countries also sent a list of ONAs Difficult to analyse the results because countries have different definitions and practices Most striking is the effect of censuses in the data

Questions to NSIs How do you see cost accounting: A budgeting tool for the NSIs to set policies? A tool aimed at minimising costs, gain efficiency? Would it be relevant to use value for money for management decisions in the NSI?

Thank you for your attention!