Monitoring sustainable development strategies and integrated approach for policy making

It is widely acknowledged that the growing complexity of modern societies increasingly needs multidimensional information to support decision making of policy makers as well as of other social and political actors. In order to respond to a multidimensional demand, we need to strengthen at its best a multi-source production system. The changes needed are so deep that the label “data revolution” is often used to point at it. In this context, the production of official figures from the integration among two or more different sources represents a substantial challenge for most NSIs not only in terms of fine tuning methodological tools. Indeed, it is equally important to carefully consider a bunch of other issues that ranges from the reengineering of statistical production processes to the designing of new IT and organisational set ups. In the background, the evolution of demand of statistics designs the paths to follow. In this paper I will present the experience that the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) is carrying out in terms of building a statistical system able to face the challenges of measuring well-being and sustainable development and to support policy making. More specifically, I will focus on four different recent experiences that represent as many examples of integrated statistics and indicators responding to different user needs. At the same time, I will try to highlight some crucial aspects that should be dealt with such as the importance of cooperation with other social parties both at national and international level, the need for data integration from different sources, the necessity to reap the advantages of new technologies; the importance of legal settings. Main advantages and critical points will be briefly highlighted as well.