NABE presidential address: building improved official statistics for decisionmaking - National Association of Business Economists - Transcript

Business Economics, Jan, 1994 by Joseph W. Duncan

IT HAS BEEN a great honor to serve as your president during the past year. Throughout more than thirty years of membership in NABE, I have been impressed with the caliber of the membership, the professional contribution of the association and with the influence of the business economist in making key contributions to their individual organizations. In 1985, Dave Williams, NABE Executive Secretary-Treasurer, asked me to start a new committee -- the Statistics Committee -- in response to a recognition that the basic data of the business economist, the national economic statistics of the federal government, were in need of improvement and were being threatened by critical budget cutbacks occurring in governmental budgets. Today I want to use this occasion to draw more specific attention to our need for and responsibility to build improved economic statistics.

A PRIVATE REPORT

For the past seven years we have published a regular column in Business Economics entitled "The Statistics Corner."(1) This column was created at the suggestion of Ed Mennis at one of the early meetings of the Statistics Committee. The column has highlighted developments in official statistics that are of importance to business economists. Also, over the years many special reports, studies, task forces and technical papers have been made about weaknesses in existing statistics as well as recommendations for improvement and suggestions for new statistical measures. As a result, a regular flow of improvements in official statistics has occurred, but the pace of change has fallen behind the structural changes occurring in the global economy. New markets and industries are flowing from dramatic changes in technology and the new economic interactions among nation states that have been made possible by low cost transportation and increasingly efficient communications systems.

In my view, we need to take a comprehensive view of these changes and the needs for statistics in the future.(2) During the past eighteen months I have been engaged in an effort designed to illustrate the nature of the challenges that face us if we are to develop the type of information that will be needed in the future to aid governmental policymakers and business decisionmakers working in this new environment. My coauthor in this effort is Dr. Andrew C. Gross, Professor of Marketing at Cleveland State University. He has both national and international experience in marketing and in the information industry, has written texts on marketing demonstrating needs for market analysis, and he has been a student of international statistical systems.

Our report is entitled Statistics for the 21st Century. It was developed with the help of a number of experts and with excellent cooperation from many individuals who toil in the vineyards of official statistics. We assured our helpers that we would take full responsibility for the structure and content because we did not want to write another "committee" report with all of the necessary compromises and tempering of tone that is normally required to protect the collaborators in their individual institutional settings.

This book is, of course, still limited by the experience, perspective, insights, and imagination of the individual authors and those consulted. It is also limited by an inability to forecast the future accurately, and by the daunting task of relating all aspects of information needs from economic and social topics to specialized concerns in the areas of energy, environment, health care, education, welfare, crime, social behavior and all of the other dimensions of understanding the global economic system.

Nevertheless we thought it would be instructive to prepare a study of the changing conditions of the statistical system that generate the basic information used by business economists in their work as they strive to understand the environment for business in the years ahead.

Statistics for the 21st Century will be made available to all members of NABE who would like a copy.(3) It will also be distributed to key policymakers in government and business with an interest or role in improving the information base for economic policy. Our hope is that the document will serve as a starting point for debate, discussion and action on improving the full statistical system. It is not a final answer: rather it is an attempt to show the importance of improving official statistics and to build the case for comprehensive action. Many issues are not addressed, but we hope the ensuing discussion will be broader and that the overlooked areas will also receive attention. In developing this effort, our literature search identified over 2,000 articles and books that are relevant to the overall subject. Even though that literature review was limited(4) it illustrates the rich resource base that is available for any serious effort to improve basic statistical information.

AN OVERALL PERSPECTIVE

In Statistics for the 21st Century we outline some of the major changes that are occurring in the collection, processing and dissemination of statistics, along with a few illustrations of dramatic change in basic economic relationships. These changes call for new sources and concepts of economic indicators. Our discussion of the major stakeholders in economic information follows the format of the now familiar SWOT analysis of "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats." A full SWOT analysis of all of the stakeholders would take several volumes, but our brief analysis shows that a growing urgency exists for closer cooperation between business and government in statistical information development that is needed by both.