Perspectives

Regrettably, there seems to be a negative public perception of that portion of the portfolio of the Minister of Planning and Dev-elopment which is responsible for collecting, collating and applying specific criteria to and disseminating statistics, ie, for the uninitiated, the classification, tabulation and study of facts relating to the State, according to the dictionary.

How many are even aware of where the Central Statistical Office (CSO) is located? Well, even the Chamber was guilty of such ignorance but was able to visit its head office at the corner of Independence Square North and Edward Street, next to the Unit Trust Building.

At first glance, and upon traversing the many floors of this building, the confusing and dilapidated environment did nothing to dispel the continuing perception that any of its work product could be reliable, helpful and accurate until we met with its director, Mr Peter Pariagh and senior statisticians including Mr Dave Clement, Clifford Lewis and Andre Blanchard.

These gentlemen explained to us that the CSO has a website which is now being restructured in order to make it adequate, interactive and to add more databases. They invited us to canvass our membership for any information the CSO could provide which would be helpful to the conduct of their businesses, for that is but part of the function of this office.

Did you know, for example, that some of the statistics available from it, include those on the Gross Domestic Product of the country, on an annual basis, data on unemployment, and jobs on a quarterly basis, the Index of Retail Prices, published 15 days after the end of each month, data on trade and the occurrence of crime?

The CSO has also conducted an agricultural census which it has published six months within one year thereafter, past any standards quite an achievement, especially bearing in mind the last one of its kind was conducted in 1982.

The reports include administrative reports, a census report for Trinidad and Tobago, a census report for Tobago, agricultural production for home use and a community Report (ie, by geographic areas.)

All the foregoing are quite separate and apart from the statistics on births, deaths, and marriages and geographical information, which details data on the population of each town, identification of each police and fire station, the ages, sex and ethnicity of all inhabitants.

Its officers were very careful and deliberate to point out that its methodology for handling all this data is approved by the International Monetary Fund and that there is no political interference, influence or engineering of the statistics which are published.

Of course, the need for, and intrinsic value of any information from whatever source can only be of a quality which is matched by appropriate resources and of which the CSO is also in need, as are most public sector units.

Apart from the general lack of physical and human resources, the CSO is in dire need of appropriate network software in order to properly process all the information it gathers and to do so more speedily.

The Office is presently being restructured as part and parcel of the Public Sector Reform Programme to make the Office a more flexible organisation, and one which can easily offer its services for hire.

Hopefully, this programme or plan will be completed before the end of this year.

It desperately needs legislative protection of all of its intellectual property by means of copyright, particularly where it proposes to offer its services to the general public and the business community, in particular, for intelligence-gathering purposes.

However, by far and wide, its largest challenge is the procurement of information from the persons and organisations to which it addresses its questionnaires. The latter are tailored for sole traders, small businesses and large corporations and government departments.

Despite whatever the efforts the CSO has made to simplify and tailor the questionnaires to encourage swift replies, the volume of information and timeliness of response is an extremely serious impediment to its functions.

The requirements of integrity of the information it publishes is such that it can only do so if five similar players in the particular industry, sector or subject of the particular statistics, answer these questionnaires.

Through this medium, the Chamber appeals to all addressees of the questionnaires to do whatever they can in assisting the CSO in performing its function by responding to them accurately and swiftly, bearing in mind the constraints under which the CSO operates.