Characterizing “data” for official statistics

With the dramatic and rapidly growing role of “data” in contemporary societies, there is increasing interest in how best to reflect this reality in countries’ official statistics. This paper suggest that an appropriately broad concept of “data” is essential, one that includes data flows as well as data bases . We motivate this approach for the recognition in official statistics of the value and importance of data in two parts. First is the need for evidence to support two major policy area, privacy and health, and then second by two more general concerns for which National Statistical Offices (NSOs) devote major efforts, inflation and entertainment. The main conclusion is that NSOs' efforts should focus on creating microdata “portraits” not only of data bases, but also the data flows among them. As a corollary, we argue that current efforts to include “data” under the rubric of digitalization in the System of National Accounts as a monetized capital stock is too limiting and arbitrary to be useful.