Global vs Local Ethics of Official Statistics

The paper explores the philosophical underpinnings of the ethics of official statistics and provides a basic conceptual classification. It distinguishes between universal ethics, supranational codifications, and national/local ethics, and examines these distinctions through various philosophical perspectives. The paper emphasizes that ethics of official statistics can only be fully understood in the context of their foundational objective(s), whether universal or alternative. It proposes that the process of discovering ethics involves critique and reformulation to address deficiencies, given that local approaches often lead to statistical quality that is inconsistent with the demands of globalization and integration for highly reliable and internationally comparable statistics produced as a global public good.