World Statistics Day

National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)

For more than 150 years, NASS has been committed to serving the public with timely, accurate, and useful statistics regarding the nation’s farm sector. In the past, programs conducted as follow-on programs to the Census of Agriculture focused on traditional agriculture-related topics such as land arrangements and aquaculture. Recently, NASS advanced the term “timely” in its mission statement by adding key programs that address the unique needs of today’s agriculture data user community.

This transition to fulfilling more timely and topical agriculture data is exemplified by the following:

• 2009 On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey, which focuses on wind, solar, and methane digesters
• Benchmark data on organic producers in the 2008 Organic Production Survey
• Increased scope of the 2008 Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey to provide a special tabulation for irrigation practices on horticultural operations
• Reissuing, after 10 years, the 2009 Census of Horticultural Specialties, with the inclusion of the long-standing data series from NASS’s floriculture survey

The data from these and other new surveys and censuses will aid decisionmakers and policymakers across the country and within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. NASS proudly credits the nation’s farmers and ranchers for their outstanding 90%-plus response rate for the organic, horticulture, and energy projects. The high response rates provided superior coverage of relatively small populations and allowed NASS to provide quality and representative data.

NASS maintains the trust of data providers with a rigid confidentiality policy. The products released in 2010 are a testimony to NASS’s ability to provide timely, accurate, and useful statistics in service to U.S. agriculture.

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has emerged as the principal criminal justice statistical agency in the nation, providing accurate, timely, and objective information to federal, state, and local policymakers. As the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, BJS is responsible for the collection, analysis, publication, and dissemination of statistical information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operations of justice systems at all levels of government.

BJS’s National Crime Victimization Survey is the only source of annual nationally representative data on a number of policy-relevant subjects connected to criminal victimization, including intimate partner violence, drugs and alcohol and crime, injury from victimization, the cost of crime, and reporting to police.

BJS’s law-enforcement program measures the operation and characteristics of more than 19,000 independent federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies in the United States.

BJS’s courts data describe court structure and case processing of felony defendants from arrest through sentencing and have been used to explore such issues as state court organization and sentencing.

BJS’s corrections reports have identified critical issues for corrections policy, including the prevalence of incarceration, the sources of growth of U.S. correctional populations, and the scope of serious mental illness among correctional populations.

Since 1995, BJS has distributed millions of dollars under the National Criminal History Improvement Program to support improvements in state and national records systems for criminal background check purposes and, more recently, to support research on offender recidivism and prisoner re-entry.

BJS also provides financial support for the establishment and operation of state statistical analysis centers to collect, analyze, and report statistics on crime and justice to federal, state, and local levels of government and to share state-level justice information nationally.

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

Since their creation, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs)—produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis—have played an integral role in helping discern the state of the U.S. economy and in guiding monetary and fiscal policy decisions that affect all Americans.

The NIPAs, which include the well-known gross domestic product (GDP), began 75 years ago. The first set of national income statistics helped the government maneuver the nation through the Great Depression. As the country entered World War II, the first series of gross national product statistics was issued to assess President Franklin Roosevelt’s war production program. To transition back to a peacetime economy after the war, new accounts were created that tracked the U.S. balance of payments and measured individual industries, sectors, states, and regions.

Throughout the years, the NIPAs changed to keep pace with a changing economy. They were extended to measure capital stock, investment, and other sources of growth. They were revised to provide better ways of measuring international trade; treat software spending as a business investment, rather than an expense; and track the rising quality of computers and IT software.

The BEA continues to develop measurements to better explain what is happening in the economy. For example, current work on health accounts will more accurately measure U.S. spending on health care. The BEA also has proposed new measures of the distribution of growth in income across households, other sectors, and regions and the sustainability of trends in saving, investment, asset prices, and other key variables important to understanding business cycles and the sources of economic growth.

GDP has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Its continuing development will bring into even sharper focus the big picture of the economy, thus improving the quality of life for all Americans.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

Reliable data are critical to informed decisionmaking for improving education in America. Indeed, the initial mission of the first Department of Education, created in 1867, was to “collect … such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories.” While today’s education and the task of assessing its scope, quality, and impact are immensely more complex, the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences continues to carry out this core function for the department and nation.

Under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, NCES has as its responsibility to “collect, report, analyze, and disseminate statistical data related to education in the United States and in other nations. …” To meet this obligation, the center continually works with data users and relies on their feedback to meet their needs for timely, comprehensive, and useful information that maintains high statistical standards. NCES strives to provide a balanced portfolio of products and services that include data about emerging issues and basic statistical information about trends in educational performance, participation, institutions, and resources.

NCES conducts institutional, household, and longitudinal surveys; carries out national and international student and adult assessments, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress; and assists states and postsecondary institutions in building a solid data infrastructure and state longitudinal data systems. The education policy issues addressed by its data collections are equally broad, including enrollment trends, access to postsecondary education, the academic achievement of students, and comparison of U.S. education with that of other countries. NCES also provides ready access to education data by offering online data analysis tools and public-use data files and granting restricted-use data licenses to qualified researchers. In addition, NCES supports statistical standards development and methodological research in the administration of surveys and assessments.