What is ESS

Since the early days of the Community it was realised that decisions as well as planning and implementation of the Community policies must be based on reliable and comparable statistics. The European Statistical System (ESS) has been developed gradually with the objective of providing comparable statistics at the EU level.

The ESS is the partnership between the Community statistical authority, which is the Commission (Eurostat), national statistical institutes (NSIs) and other national authorities in each Member State in charge of the development, production and dissemination of the European statistics. This partnership also includes the EEA and EFTA countries. The Member States collect data and compile statistics for national and EU purposes. The ESS functions as a network in which Eurostat’s role is to lead the way in the harmonization of statistics in close cooperation with the national statistical authorities. The ESS work concentrates mainly on EU policy areas - but, with the extension of EU policies, harmonization has been extended to nearly all statistical fields.

The ESS also coordinates its work with candidate countries and at the European level with other Commission services, agencies the ECB and with international organisations such as the OECD, the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

On its website the ESS it also provides the following information:

• News of interest to all ESS partners, such as appointments, upcoming meetings and conferences, training opportunities, vacancies and publications.

• Corporate information about the ESS partners, such as their organisational structure, management issues and practical information.