Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee on the Na­tion­al Sta­tis­ti­cal In­sti­tute of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NSITT) Bill is ex­pect­ed to re­port on the bill in De­cem­ber.

The bill was laid in Par­lia­ment on June 20, 2018, by Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Camille Robin­son-Reg­is.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, “The NSITT will fa­cil­i­tate in­formed de­ci­sion-mak­ing, through the time­ly pro­vi­sion of a qual­i­ty, rel­e­vant, user-ori­ent­ed and dy­nam­ic sta­tis­ti­cal ser­vice, co­or­di­nat­ing sta­tis­ti­cal ac­tiv­i­ties and pro­mot­ing the ad­her­ence to sta­tis­ti­cal stan­dards” and will “in­her­it a num­ber of im­por­tant, re­gion­al oblig­a­tions and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties which are es­sen­tial­ly man­aged by the Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at on Re­gion­al Sta­tis­tics (CCS).”

The NSITT was en­vis­aged by the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion and in­tro­duced to the pub­lic by Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert in his first bud­get state­ment for their cur­rent tenure in 2016.

His jus­ti­fi­ca­tion was be­cause “our Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice has been se­vere­ly ne­glect­ed for decades”.

In his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion in Par­lia­ment in 2016, Im­bert said the coun­try’s in­abil­i­ty to pro­vide in­ac­cu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal da­ta has gar­nered the at­ten­tion of many in­ter­na­tion­al bod­ies/

He said, “In fact, Moody’s In­vestor Ser­vices cit­ed poor sta­tis­ti­cal da­ta as one of the rea­sons for the down­grade of our coun­try’s cred­it rat­ing un­der the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment. It goes with­out say­ing that it is vir­tu­al­ly im­pos­si­ble to de­rive in­formed pol­i­cy de­ci­sions with­out ac­cu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal da­ta. In re­cent years there has been a lot of scep­ti­cism on the au­then­tic­i­ty of the sta­tis­tics pro­duced. This has led to a loss of con­fi­dence both do­mes­ti­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly in the analy­ses and is­suance of var­i­ous so­cial and eco­nom­ic da­ta.”