Abstract

Peer reviews are a form of an external assessment / evaluation to assess the compliance of a system against certain benchmarks. The European Statistical System, consisting of the National Statistical Offices and other national authorities developing, producing and disseminating European/official statistics of 27 EU Member States and 4 EFTA countries as well as Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union, has developed, back in 2005, its benchmark – the European statistics Code of Practice. The Code of Practice represents European standards for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics. It is not only a benchmark but also meant to increase the independence, integrity and accountability of the national statistical authorities and Eurostat. It is against this European statistics Code of Practice that the European Statistical System has launched peer reviews, starting in 2006-2008 against the 2005 version of the Code, continuing in 2013-2015 against the 2011 version of the Code and now being in the third round against the 2017 version of the Code.
The presentation will inform about elements of governance and the design process to develop the methodology for implementing peer reviews on national statistical systems in the EU member states. It will explain how these elements promoted ownership and smoothness of the process among the participating countries. Furthermore, some key aspects of the methodology and instruments to conduct this third round of peer reviews in the European statistical system will be presented, including some comparison with the methodology used in previous rounds of peer reviews. The key aspects include the objectives of the peer reviews, the scope and coverage of the review, the approach used for the peer reviews, a description of different phases of a review, implementation arrangements and finally how the results/output of the peer reviews will be organized. Some elements of the communication campaign around this round of peer reviews in the European Statistical System will also be presented as well as some lessons learnt.
As almost all of the 31 planned peer review visits are implemented and half of the country reports on the peer reviews are already available on the websites of the reviewed statistical offices and Eurostat, some preliminary results from this round of peer reviews are already available. We will present a summary of those results, including strengths as well as a general trend of the improvement recommendations contained in the reports but also mentioning some more specific areas of improvements identified in the peer review process.