STATISTICS OFFICE IMPROVES MEASURES FOR RELIABLE INFORMATION

14/08/2014

Fiji’s Bureau of Statistics is improving measures and looking into various opportunities to continue to collate accurate data for their work.

Government statistician, Epeli Waqavonovono said that with the increased government funding, the statistics office have had regular household and business surveys.

“The monitoring and evaluation requirements of government agencies are pushing a lot of users to convince government about the resources that’s required by the Bureau of Statistics to capture the additional information that’s available. And also what we notice is that there is now a greater acknowledgement of the importance of statistics.

He added that the statistics office is now able to do regular compilation of supply use tables when there is continuous development of new indicators to improve on the measurements.

“Some of the development work that we are engaging in is to have quarterly GDP also to have poverty incidence rates at the lower levels of geography so we can help our development partners target areas which are in need for assistance.

Mr Waqavonovono also highlighted that the various ways of collecting data now includes the new forms of registrations for mobile phones, FNPF and even the elections voter registration.

“Also you may have noticed the last few years is that there has been a lot of registration information for Tax, FNPF, register for mobile phones and registrations for elections, these are all valuable information that we can have access to.

“And also for health information, deaths, births in hospitals now and attended to are confirmed by medical personnel. But the problem we have is the quality of information that is captured by those people responsible,” Mr Waqavonovono said.

He also confirmed that the other forms of data are from the Fiji Revenue and Customs Authority (FRCA) tax forms and the academic institutions.

The statistics office has acquired qualified personnel and extended the number of staff to improve service delivery.

-ENDS-