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Strong coordination

Official-statistics production is institutionally coordinated by the National Council for Statistical Information (CNIS). INSEE contributes to the consistency of the statistical system by acting as the CNIS secretariat and administering technical and human resources.

Technical coordination

In addition to its production activities, the Institute coordinates statistical operations in three ways: it manages registers (National Identification Register of Private Individuals [Répertoire National d'Identification des Personnes Physiques] and Register of Enterprises and Local Units [Répertoire des Entreprises et des Établissements]). It defines classifications (classifications of economic activities and products, official geographic code, classifications of occupations and socio-occupational categories). It determines the accounting and conceptual frameworks (national accounts, satellite accounts).

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Coordination through people

INSEE administers the "civil-service statistician" (fonctionnaire-statisticien) category of its own staff and that of ministerial statistical offices. The Institute supervises their training and careers.

This unified career-management approach is a key coordination tool.

INSEE organizes the mobility of its management-level staff in order to ensure the transmission of competencies. Mobility of management-level personnel in the official statistical sector is a means to disseminate methods and ensure their consistency.

Moreover, thanks to the openness of careers throughout the official statistical system, management-level staff can find fields of interest covering a vast range of economic and social concerns. This has a positive impact on career opportunities and promotes mobility.

The consistency of French official statistics is strengthened by the single training system. Two schools, ENSAE and ENSAI, provide initial training for nearly all management-level personnel in the official statistical system.

Two INSEE-managed training centers, CEPE and CEFIL, are tasked with contributing to the career-long training of all government statisticians.

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Functional decentralization and coordination

The French statistical system offers advantages in terms of efficiency and responsiveness. Inside a ministry, it is easier for a specialized statistical office than for an outside entity to process for statistical purposes the documents initially designed and collected for administrative use (such as tax and customs forms).

The "in-house" office is also in a better position to perceive user demand and to be informed of developments affecting the environment in which it collects statistics. Lastly, there are closer ties with institutions that use and study the information gathered, and with government decision-making centers.

But this "functional decentralization" raises the risk of redundancy, gaps, and inconsistencies. If each producer office were concerned only about its own work and disregarded the needs of other offices or the information available there, the offices could compile similar but not necessarily convergent statistics. At the same time, the offices would not make full use of the available sources, and some fields might not be covered. The obligation for producers to justify their projects and methods before CNIS is a powerful deterrent against these potential drifts—most notably to avoid redundancy and to achieve unity of concepts, methods, and practices (in particular in the field of ethics).

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