Introduction
A successful integration agenda requires good quality information which in turn depends on a healthy operation to produce it. A body of evidence can be built scientifically using rigorous methods and tools, or in today’s ICT- enabled world, built unsystematically by turning imperfect, complex, often unstructured data into actionable information. Thus evidence can be official or unofficial and include for example data, statistics, expert knowledge, policy evaluation, research, feedback from stakeholder consultations, and the untapped explosion of high frequency digital data.
An evidence base is therefore a rich variety of quantitative and qualitative observations systematically or unsystematically collected, processed and disseminated. Sources include individuals, households, businesses, government departments and agencies for systematic collection; and the internet, customer logs and transactions, and satellite images to name a few, for unsystematic collection. Notwithstanding the sources, issues of quality, credibility, relevance and cost are essential to determining the statistical requirements for the region’s integration agenda.
The Revised Treaty of Basseterre provides for deepening integration among ten OECS Member States, establishing the Economic Union as a strong regional bloc for attainment of collective developmental objectives in a single economic, social and environmental space. The regimes are the free movement of people, goods, services and capital among the Member States effected with imperatives such as common policies and strategies, uniform legislation and comparable data.
Strengthening the Evidence Base for the OECS Economic Union’s Integration Agenda: Requirements for a Regional Statistical System
by: Dr. Gale Archibald , Head, OECS Statistical Services Unit
Focusing on the latter, the integration agenda would require an operation that is authorised and resourced to collect data from an array of sources that produces an assortment of evidence, for a diverse set of users, for multiple uses to inform and to measure progress toward full integration. This operation must have well-connected elements and be capable of harvesting ideas to move the Economic Union forward and towards its ultimate goal. This operation likens a well-structured, interdependent and coordinated configuration.
The aim of this article is to identify the features and attributes of a system to provide the requisite official statistics to inform the design of and adjustments to regional programmes, policies and strategies and to monitor the progress of the Economic Union towards full integration.
Concept of a statistical system
The concept of a statistical system is ubiquitous in the lexicon of statistical development. Leaning on systems thinking theory, a system is described as a set of elements or components that work together in relationships for the overall goal of the whole. These elements are usually described as actors, roles, rules, interrelationships, feedback loops and boundaries with each having a limited and defined function. Additionally, the theory posits a system is goal-oriented, assumes a holistic view and is more than a sum of its parts. That is, when the elements interact with each other they are able to produce results that could not have been achieved outside the system.
Applied to the world of official statistics, the system would be the many elements that are