Establishing a national statistical system Setting up and updating a national statistical system demands considerable investment.
Most countries have such legal and institutional arrangements.
In many countries, the NSS is decentralised, with a number of institutions involved in data collection and dissemination, often in an uncoordinated and non-complementary manner. In some countries, attempts have been made to centralise production of official statistics in the NSO to take advantage of economies of scale. However, this has not always been successful due to the NSO's limited capacity. A better approach to organisation and management of the NSS has been for the NSO to play a coordinating, regulatory and supervisory role in addition to collecting and disseminating those official statistics that no other institution has the capacity to collect and compile.