National Institute of Statistics and Census of Argentina


The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses is an Argentine decentralized public body that operates within the Ministry of Economy, which leads all official statistical activities carried out in the country.
In February 2013, the International Monetary Fund censured Argentina for failing to report accurate inflation data. Political intervention in the INDEC figures ended, and the IMF declared in November 2016 that Argentine statistics were again in accordance with international standards.

Definition

The INDEC is a public deconcentrated body, of a technical nature, within the scope of Argentina's National Ministry of Economy, and which runs all the official statistical activities carried out throughout the country.
Its creation and operation are regulated by , executive orders and , and INDEC Provision . It is a deconcentrated entity within the scope of the Ministry of Treasury of Argentina.
INDEC produces statistical information on Argentina, which can be used by governments for public policy planning. It can also be used for research and projections in the academic and private fields.
Citizen and stakeholder cooperation and contribution of primary data are fundamental in statistical production. Individual data are confidential and are protected by statistical confidentiality established in Law 17622, and results are always published as statistics. Release dates are informed in the , available on the Institute's web page.

Duties

INDEC's duties are established in Law 17622, section 5: to implement a statistical policy for the Argentine State; to give structure to National Statistical System and lead it; to design statistical methodologies for statistical production; to organise and run statistical infrastructure operations; and to produce basic indicators and social, economic, demographic and geographic data.

Structure

INDEC has a pyramid hierarchy. "empowers the minister of Treasury, following the involvement of the Undersecretary of Public Employment Planning of the Ministry of Modernisation, to approve the lower organisation structure up to 28 directorates and 15 coordinating units."
In May 2017, the structure of the Institute was redesigned and confirmed by of the Office of the National Chief of Cabinet. The new organisation structure provided for the inclusion, standardisation, reassignment and recognition of the national and general directorates and their corresponding responsibilities and actions, and created the position of Managing Director.
The Management Directorate leads the National Directorate of the National Statistical System, the General Directorate of Administration and Operations, the General Directorate of Human Resources and Organisation, the Informatics Directorate, and the Legal Affairs Directorate.
The Technical Directorate, also under the General Directorate, is in charge of the National Directorate of Statistical Methodology, the National Directorate of National Accounts, the National Directorate of International Accounts, the National Directorate of Statistics and Prices of Production and Trade, the National Directorate of External Sector Statistics, the National Directorate of Social and Population Statistics, and the National Directorate of Living Conditions Statistics.
The also includes the National Directorate of Dissemination and Communication, in charge of "leading and conducting specific communication programmes designed around various public objectives"; and the National Directorate of Planning and Institutional and International Relations, which "draws and updates the Institute's international relations map, establishing and initiating those which are key to the strategic plan." They are both directly under the Institute's General Directorate.

Coordination of the National Statistical System

INDEC coordinates the operations of the National Statistical System under the principles of regulatory centralisation and executive decentralisation; produces the Annual Programme of Statistics and Censuses; and develops methodologies and rules to ensure data comparability between different sources.
The NSS includes INDEC and the central statistical bodies and peripheral statistical bodies, which are the organic units who produce, compile, interpret and disseminate official statistics.
Each province has a provincial statistics office, under the provincial government. INDEC signs agreements with each PSO concerning the activities to be carried out during a year in terms of organisation and conducting national operations, following the federal nature of the Republic of Argentina.
In 1980, INDEC established a division by regions to provide statistical information. The regions were Metropolitan, Cuyo, North-West, North-East, Pampas and Patagonia. The Institute's current regional nomenclature is as follows.
The new structure, approved by resolution 426-E/2017, included six new regional offices, one for each statistical region established by INDEC: Greater Buenos Aires, Cuyo, Pampas, North-East, North-West and Patagonia.
In December 2017, the Institute announced the creation of regional offices NEA and NOA. The Patagonia office was inaugurated in March 2018. These offices represent the Institute and the National Directorate of the NSS as an institutional link with provincial and local statistical bodies. Among other responsibilities, they must also enable the processes and tasks in the annual statistical programme, national censuses and other statistical operations; propose actions to improve the articulation of the NSS; and provide technical assistance to provincial and local agencies to strengthen the public statistical service.

Statistical secrecy

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Decree 3110/70, article 14 describes the regulatory provisions of Law 17622, and establishes that all communication from the Institute must ensure statistical secrecy, i.e. the confidentiality of the individual data provided by respondents. All data shall be published solely as statistics, in a way that cannot infringe trade or proprietary confidentiality, or enable identification of the persons or bodies to which the data refers.
"Individual statements and/or information shall not be communicated to third parties –even if they are judicial authorities or official services other than the NSS's –, nor shall they be used, disseminated or published in such a way that enables the identification of the individual or entity making the statement or providing the information".
Additionally, article 15 states that "the peripheral statistical services may have access to the individual information gathered by the central statistical services on condition that they are based on legal instruments that establish the same obligation, prohibition and punishment regime to safeguard statistical secrecy."
Statistical secrecy, also called "statistical confidentiality", is a legal resource used by official statistical offices around the world to protect respondents' individual data.
  • In the statistical field, the laws that safeguard confidentiality of sources is based on the need to preserve the privacy of persons and entities against events or actions that third parties could provoke, induce or carry out to the detriment of respondents.
  • Individual data protections are contained in the legislation in force, which includes Law 17622, which created INDEC, its regulatory provision and further supplementary provisions, publicly available on .
  • Articles 10, 13 and 17 of the Law establish that every participant at any stage of production of official statistical information has the obligation of maintaining statistical secrecy.
  • Items 5 and 10 of Provision 011/88, Annex I, detail that "no information which, as a result of the simultaneous application of various conditioning criteria, corresponds to a limited amount of elements may be provided, since in such a case the units may be easily identified" and "the data are to be published in such a manner that avoids deducing the numerical value corresponding to a certain statistical unit which is known to integrate the universe presented in the table", respectively.
  • The databases provided must be unnamed and, in cases in which an economic sector or geographic zone shows less than three records, these units must be grouped in other categories to avoid possible identification or deduction of individual values. This confidentiality system matches the ones used internationally.
  • The production of statistics is based on the capacity to request and obtain data from individual respondents and compile the data. Whatever the nature or condition of the respondent, collaboration lies largely on the trust conveyed by the requester.
  • For this reason, in all countries, statistics are legally related to two types of duties:
a) the respondent's duty to provide truthful information
b) the statistical office's duty to ensure that the individual response be handled with the strictest confidentiality.
This is the principle of "statistical secrecy", i.e. the legal protection of any natural or legal person obliged to provide data to the NSS services, to be used solely for statistical purposes.