Division 3.7 The balance of costs and benefits

The ESS has to maintain a vigilant watch on the balance between the need for information for Community policy purposes and the resources required at EU, national and regional level to provide this information. The provision of adequate resources in the national context is of particular importance in pursuing the statistical information requirements of EU policy decisions. It is, however, also important to maintain sufficient flexibility to allow the national authorities to satisfy Community statistical information needs in the most cost-effective manner.

The setting of priorities will be based on three high-level guiding principles:

• assessment of users’ needs, including relevance for policy making at Community level,

• assessment of cost implications for respondents, Member States and the Commission using, for example, the EU Net Cost Model or the Standard Cost Model, and

• assessment of specific statistical issues of importance for the cost-effectiveness of particular statistics, including the trade-off between different components of statistical quality, e.g. ‘accuracy’ and ‘timeliness’, and possibilities for flexible reporting obligations focusing on core European needs.

In order to maximise overall cost-effectiveness and to pursue a balanced prioritisation of activities within the annual statistical work programmes, these principles will be applied in a transparent way and according to practical guidelines to be developed and maintained by Eurostat in cooperation with the national statistical authorities.

The objectives for the programme period are to:

• put in place methods for in-depth step-by-step reviews of existing domains of Community statistics and for the assessment of new or substantially changed user requests. This is important for the continuous improvement of Community statistics, ensuring the identification of requirements which can be reduced or discontinued, and for the introduction of revised or new statistical initiatives,

• subject all fields covered by this programme to a cost-effectiveness analysis, starting with a cost-burden estimation, allowing for a systematic reprioritisation before the end of the programme period 2008 to 2012. An action plan for the whole process will be launched within the first six months of the programme period 2008 to 2012,

• subject all new statistical projects or major revisions of existing statistics likely to impose a significant additional burden on the data providers, in particular enterprises, to a cost-effectiveness analysis prior to their implementation,

• set targets for the limitation or reduction of the overall costs and burdens to guide the review and re-prioritisation process,

• ensure that the reporting burden is proportionate to the needs of users and not excessive for respondents, especially in the case of small and medium-sized enterprises. Measures for monitoring the reporting burden will be put in place and ways of minimising the burden put in practice. Increased use of administrative data for statistical purposes will be an important instrument in this regard, and

• use, as far as possible, existing data to fulfil new statistical requirements.