It's time to get up-to-date data

Representatives of the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Trade couldn't respond to questions about the effect of higher fuel prices on the cost of living when they were asked by the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee on Wednesday.

The resulting discussion was fuelled by speculation and contemplation of everything related to the matter, precious little of it guided by any actual, verifiable facts garnered from statistical evidence. Unsurprisingly, the only thing that the Trade Ministry's acting permanent secretary, Randall Karim, seemed able to answer with any certainty was the impact of import costs on local retail prices; something any shopper could have stated with equal clarity.

The reason for all this fuzziness in governance? The required data for any such analysis was not available from the Central Statistical Office (CSO). It's another reminder that the government consists of silos of data that only spottily make their way to the CSO, crippling efforts by both local stakeholders and global-ranking firms to analyse the specifics of the national economy.

Even as calls for open data platforms increase, the most basic data-collection benchmarks are sketchily updated and sometimes are entirely unavailable. When covid19 lockdowns demanded national connectivity for students, information about connectivity and devices in households that's routinely tracked in other countries, was gathered through desperation, not organisation. It's been years since the CSO was set to be replaced by the National Statistical Institute (NSITT), and the continued inability to either commit to establishing the institute or to demand more quality data collection from the CSO leads the public to believe that the government is making policy by intuition instead of being guided by the cold, hard reality of governance statistics.

The NSITT is supposed to bring an end to this institutional problem by giving the new statistical authority the power, under law, to demand the information it needs to do its work.

Is there a reason, beyond bureaucracy and institutional ineptitude, why the government has been dragging its feet on this critical matter since the National Statistical Institute Bill was laid in Parliament since 2018? Does widespread availability of government statistical data represent a potential challenge to the decisions of politicians?

In July 2022, the United Nations (UN) gave the CSO a grant of US$721,400, which would include computers, to specifically compile local data relevant to the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, so that TT could report as a signatory to this initiative on its compliance with these goals. Planning Minister Pennelope Beckles described it as a milestone and a red-letter day for TT.

It was a humiliating reminder that despite decades of talk, this country continues to fail to compile, with regularity and authority, even the most basic data required for governance.