The law to regulate the organisation of national statistics office, Statec, focuses on three significant areas which will alter that way the institution operates. Firstly, it will provide Statec with official status at the head of a statistics gathering network. “The historical evolution of the Luxembourg statistics system meant that Statec was no longer at the centre of statistics gathering,” explains Statec director Serge Allegrezza. Indeed, ministries and administrations were gathering data but not as statisticians, which meant they were submitting statistics in formats, or under conditions, that were not acceptable to international institutions. Therefore Luxembourg was often missing from comparative reports published by the likes of the OECD, IMF or United Nations. “This will provide more consistency in the system,” Allegrezza says.

The second positive change concerns the governance of Statec itself. The draft bill transposes into law the 15 key principles for the production and dissemination of European official statistics and the institutional environment under which statistical authorities operate. “We already operated under those principles,” says Allegrezza. “But now they are official, which makes us more transparent.” The law also allows Statec to officially cooperate with other research facilities and benefit from funds available from the Fonds National de Recherche, for example. “So we can develop research techniques and embark on both macro- and micro-economic model building,” Allegrezza explains. Indeed, the only disappointment Allegrezza feels is that Statec is not being given more autonomy in hiring employees. “But I am not a utopian and realise that would require reform of the entire civil service.”