Le soluzioni istituzionali alla qualità dell'informazione statistica

At present many relations among institutions and between institutions and citizens are based on confidence more than law. To foster confidence in social relations an important role is played by the information and, particularly, by the statistical information. Recent events show how hard it is assuring an high level of quality of the statistical information in a context where several operators provide it. The aim of this essay is to note which solutions the Italian system offers to own citizens, in order to guarantee the reliability on the statistical information. Statistics takes importance in law throughout two different perspectives: on the one hand, the statistical data is necessary for public policies; on the other, the statistical information is a collective good which has to be guaranteed. The Italian constitution lacks immediate consideration on it, even if Italy established a statistical network-shaped system (named SISTAN) in the local, regional and national levels since 1989. In the Italian statistical system it is possible to distinguish two kinds of data: official statistics and non-official statistics. The SISTAN, run by the ISTAT, which is a component of the European Statistical System (ESS), provides for the former which is assumed as reliable, impartial and objective. In this way a remarkable part of the statistical production is ignored, i.e. the whole private one. To guarantee the quality of the official statistics there are just two ways: the function of policing from a specific board (named CoGIS) and the increasing centralization at the European level of the main choices about the statistical products. Yet these solutions are unsatisfactory, because they remain inside the two statistical systems, SISTAN and ESS, dominated by the public sector.