Any decision that affects the allocation of scarce resources is an economic decision. However, to make good decisions, they may ask for expert support, and econometricians should be able to provide that support. This was, and still is, a very important function, one that occupies most of the research time of the majority of academic econometricians. However, it only gave the econometrician an indirect role as an economist's sidekick. Regardless of what economists do, economic problems persist in reality.
Decisions have to be made.
The modern role of an econometrician is therefore more direct. Econometricians extract information from the available data in order to provide support for an economic decision. The raw material that the econometrician uses is more often real observed data, instead of economic theory. Of course, in any specific problem if an economic theory that has been validated by data exists, it will certainly be used. If no such model exists, however, the econometrician still has to make a statistical model for the data, and provide intelligent support for the decision process.