Peer reviews of the European statistics and the involvement of users in the quality assurance of official statistics : an example focused in the Spanish Living Conditions Survey

Nowadays, the national statistical offices are moving a step forward from traditional quality assessment done by the offices themselves, towards a more complete quality system that involves external experts and other stakeholders. The INE has launched several initiatives in this context, one of them being the one described in this section of the SSJ: the organization of seminars with experts (researchers and academia) focused in a specific statistic. In this paper, this initiative is described, by putting it in the context of the European Union’s Peer Review, processes for auditing the quality of the activity of the statistical Offices. The article also justifies the selection of the "Spanish Living Conditions Survey" (ES-SILC) integrated in the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for this action, based on the inherent importance of the subjects studied by this statistic (income inequality, poverty. . . ), and on the attention paid to the quality assessment of their data, both in the European and the Spanish environments.