European Statistical System

The EEA agreement between the EU member countries and the three EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway also regulates statistical cooperation. As a result, the Office for Statistics is part of the European Statistical System (ESS).

Structure

The ESS is a partnership between Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, the national statistical offices as well as other national producers of official statistics of the EU and EFTA countries. The ESS is conceived as a network, in which Eurostat has the leading role in the harmonization of statistics. It fulfills this role in close cooperation with the national statistical offices. The legal basis of the European Statistical System is Regulation No. 223/2009 on European Statistics.

Tasks

The ESS Member States collect data and compile statistics for both national and EEA purposes. According to the EEA Agreement, the EEA member countries ensure the production and dissemination of coherent and comparable statistics that serve to describe and monitor all relevant economic, social and environmental aspects of the European Economic Area. To this end, the EEA Member States develop and use harmonized methods, definitions and classifications, as well as common programs and procedures.

Further information on the European Statistical System can be found on the ESS website. Statistical data on Liechtenstein and other European countries can be retrieved from Eurostat s website. Under the heading Data on the Eurostat website, the statistical information is arranged according to topics. Clicking on a particular topic allows access to main tables on that topic. The main tables usually contain country data and thus facilitate country comparisons.