page_title: Federal Statistical Office (Switzerland)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Federal Statistical Office (Switzerland) / History
context_page_description: The Federal Statistical Office is a Federal agency of the Swiss Confederation. It is the statistics office of Switzerland, situated in Neuchâtel and attached to the Federal Department of Home Affairs.
  The Federal Statistical Office is the national service provider and competence centre for statistical observations in areas of national, social, economic and environmental importance. The FSO is the main producer of statistics in the country and runs the Swiss Statistics data pool. It provides information on all subject areas covered by official statistics.
  The office is closely linked to the national statistics scene as well as to partners in the worlds of science, business and politics. It works closely with Eurostat, the Statistics Office of the European Union, in order to provide information that is also comparable at an international level.
  The key principles upheld by the office throughout its statistical activities are data protection, scientific reliability, impartiality, topicality and service orientation.
context_section_description: With the founding of the Swiss Federal State in 1848, statistics gained in importance at national level: statistics became the task of the Department of Home Affairs under Stefano Franscini who conducted the first  population census in the newly founded federal state in 1850.
  In 1860, the Federal Statistics Bureau (the present Federal Statistical Office) was founded in Bern, where it was located until 1998. Since 1998 all sections of the FSO have been centrally located in one building in Neuchâtel.
  In the year of the FSO's foundation, a federal act was passed on the population census to be conducted every ten years. Ten years later the law was extended. In 1870, Parliament approved a brief law confined to organisational issues about "official statistical surveys in Switzerland". In 1992 this was replaced with the more up-to-date Federal Statistics Act. The new  Federal Constitution of 1999 included for the first time an article (Art. 65) regarding statistics. In 2002 the Charter of Swiss Public Statistics was approved. One of the aims of the Charter is to establish universal principles that are based upon international standards but that also take particularities of the Swiss statistical system into account. The bilateral cooperation agreement between Switzerland and the European Union in the area of statistics came into force in 2007.
  The Statistical Yearbook of Switzerland was first published in 1891 and has since then been published without interruption by the FSO. Since 1987, the FSO has been making important statistical information available online in electronic form,  and in 1996 this service was extended and the STATINF database and website were added.
caption: Stefano Franscini, Director of the Department of Home Affairs (1848-1857).
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