‘Without quality data, there is no accountability’ — ECLAC experts warn

Sep 04, 2026 News

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(Kaieteur News) – Experts from across Latin America and the Caribbean have underscored the critical role of official statistics in safeguarding democracy, strengthening governance and helping governments manage economic, social and environmental challenges.

The warning came on Wednesday at the opening of the 25th Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA) of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), being held at ECLAC’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile.

The meeting, regarded as the region’s main forum for advancing statistical development, was officially opened by ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs and Marcelo Bisogno, Technical Director of Uruguay’s National Institute of Statistics, which currently chairs the Conference.

In his opening words, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs noted that twenty-five meetings of the Executive Committee and twenty-six years since the creation of the Statistical Conference of the Americas are evidence of something uncommon in regional cooperation: a community that has lasted over time, built up a method and trust, and made joint technical work an institutional asset for Latin America and the Caribbean. The executive secretary of ECLAC noted that the Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, presented on 20 August, focuses on informality and on productive formalization as a path to elevating productivity. He stated that the quality of the analysis on informality, one of the main characteristics of employment in the region and certainly a multidimensional challenge, depends directly on the quality, frequency, and comparability of the instruments designed and implemented, and pointed out that this principle is valid for most of the transformations ECLAC proposes for overcoming the development traps in which the region finds itself.

“There is no good productive development policy without solid economic and company statistics; there is no policy of effective care without time-use surveys; there is no climate policy on the necessary scale without solid environmental accounting; there is no well-focused social policy without disaggregated data. Without quality data, there are no solid analyses, no evaluation, and no accountability,” he stated.

The chief representative of the regional organization noted that last May, the Group of High-Level Experts called together by the Secretary General of the United Nations presented its report Counting what counts: A compass of progress for people and planet, the central proposal of which is a table with 31 indicators organized into 4 pillars: i) current wellbeing; ii) equity and inclusion; iii) sustainability and resilience; and iv) fundamental principles like peace, human rights, and caring for the planet. During 2026 and 2027, the intergovernmental process will define which of these proposals will become effective commitments.

“Between a conceptual recommendation and an indicator that a country can produce regularly and comparably, there is purely statistical work: operative definitions, metadata, sources, frequency, disaggregation, and an evaluation of the feasibility of production in countries very different from each other. That is the conversation to which this community cannot be late. I invite you to help this Conference make that voice heard in an organized manner, through the monitoring mechanisms that are established, so that the region can come to that table with its own position and ability to execute,” he said.

For his part, Marcelo Bisogno, Technical Director of the National Institute of Statistics of Uruguay, highlighted that the solidarity that characterizes the region’s statistical systems is a strategic asset countries should care for and strengthen.

He added that “the trap of ineffective governance is not an inevitable fate; it is, as the ECLAC analysis correctly proposes, a set of foreseeable restrictions that we can anticipate and, with determination and joint work, dismantle. This applies to our statistical systems,” he said.

“We live in an era in which truth itself is in dispute. In this context, a trustworthy datum, produced independently, rigorously, and transparently, is not just a technical input; it is an act of defense of public trust,” he emphasised.

During the 25th Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of ECLAC, regional progress and challenges regarding the implementation of household surveys, one of the main instruments for producing official statistics, will be analyzed. Strategies for strengthening the institutional capacities of national statistics systems will also be addressed.

The Statistical Conference of the Americas is a subsidiary body of the ECLAC and the main forum for discussing the development of statistics in the region. Its main mandates are promoting the development and improvement of national statistics and their international comparability, as well as international, regional, and bilateral cooperation between national offices and institutional and regional organisations. Along with Uruguay as the Chair, the Executive Committee of the SCA for the 2026-2027 period is made up of Bahamas, Belize, Spain, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

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• accountability, ECLAC, quality data, safeguarding democracy

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