Statistical support

Statistics help support the analysis and observation of changes in markets and sectors. Statistics thus represent an indispensible support tool for economic policies and for drawing up prognoses.

The FPS Economy as Belgium's official statistician

The FPS Economy plays a pivotal role in collecting and providing statistics and economic information. Within the Belgian administrative and institutional landscape as well as internationally, it is the statistician of choice for providing official, relevant, objective and up-to-date statistics. These figures and data are supplied in order to efficiently support and anticipate social and economic policies.

The official statistician is responsible for establishing the multi-year statistical programmes in order to balance out the supply and demand of official statistics in Belgium.

Moreover, the official statistician has the exclusive responsibility of controlling and certifying the production of statistics through a certification mechanism. Finally, a Surveillance Committee, established by law as part of the Commission for the Protection of Privacy, is in charge of authorising the reporting of data from studies which was encoded in the interest of privacy.

The FPS Economy collects basic statistical data which is necessary for the missions of the Institute of National Accounts (INA), such as compiling statistics and economic forecasting (national and regional accounts, statistics on exterior trade, economic budgets, economic “input-output” charts).

Ensuring high-performance use of economic information

To achieve its goal of being an undisputed reference in its field, the FPS Economy focuses all of its attention on the high-performance use of statistical and economic data. Its aim is to provide a maximum amount of the available socio-economic data in a structured, quick, modern, and user-friendly way. Beneficiaries are political authorities, businesses, consumers, and any interested individual as well as the Directorates-General of the FPS. The data warehouse allows for the “internal” use of data at the FPS Economy as well as the integration of indicators from external databanks and the development of data from the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises.

Administrative simplification, reorganisation of processes and negotiations with external partners

In addition, administrative simplification which was initiated by previous legislatures is continued for surveys addressed to businesses as well as citizens. This objective has led to the re-engineering of production processes for statistics, designed to better integrate the various statistical surveys, and to screening of these surveys in order to ensure that the collected information is still relevant or that it cannot be obtained with administrative data.

However, even more significant advances in administrative simplification require for obstacles to access to databanks which are external to the FPS to be identified and removed, either through legal means or by negotiating new cooperation protocols with the managers of said datebanks.