1. Cost accounting in the ESS
Policy Group on Statistical Cooperation October 2016, Zadar, Croatia
Cost accounting in the ESS
Point 8 of the Agenda

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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 collected from NSIs
Shortcomings in the survey methodology; results not released
11 MS worked on methodology
Second round of survey 2016, covers , 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

7. 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
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

8. 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?

9. Thank you for your attention!