Stats office geared up for reforms

By LEMACH LAVARI
THE National Statistical Office (NSO) is undergoing reforms and will be carrying out three major projects in 2019, says chief statistician Roko Koloma, pictured.
Koloma said the projects were data collection on all companies registered with the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA), household expenditure survey and the 2020 National Census.
He said the census would be the biggest exercise of the three.
Koloma said the household expenditure survey would be carried out njhext year.
“From the results of the survey, we will know what Papua New Guineans are spending their money on and the income distribution in the country,” he said.
Koloma said the strategy for reform of NSO was set from 2015 to 2019.
He said NSO was in the process of building systems that would enable it to produce important statistics such as the gross domestic product (GDP) on a timely basis.
Koloma said the exercise was based on a 2014 government decision that called for reform.
He said prior to 2014 the NSO did not compile the national accounts.
“These accounts are produced to measure the GDP estimates of the country,” Koloma said.
“GDP measures the economic performance of the country.
“We have produced a series (of GDP reports) from 2007 to 2014; 2015 will be released next week.”
He said NSO was guided by international standards and methods and the reform was for it to operate up to these standards.
Koloma said the NSO had improved since it started the reform process in 2015.
He said key areas of the reforms were capacity building of its staff and meeting world standards
and methods in production of statistics.
“The reform is about us trying to fix up something that was not done properly in the past,” Koloma said.