Guidelines for Preparing Country's Paper on Data Quality Assessment

At the meeting of international organisations of 25 January 2002 in Luxembourg, it was agreed that each organisation would invite two or three of its Member States to produce a paper assessing the quality of the Joint Organisations Data Exercise for their particular country. The objective of this action is to pass on national methods and standards of evaluating quality used by countries more experienced in this field to those seeking guidance.

In order to obtain papers that make reference to specific areas of interest as well as to obtain experience on common issues at a national level, it was agreed to establish a list of topics that national papers would be invited to cover.

Structure of national papers

Some of the issues to which national papers should refer to are listed here.

Emphasis should be given to points 1 and 2a.

1. Description of the process

• flow of information
• data sources/suppliers
• means of data communication
• resources required
• use of information at national level
• interaction with other processes (monthly or quarterly oil statistics)

2. Quality assessment

Reference should be made to the following quality criteria (see Eurostat quality paper):

a. Accuracy

• time series' revisions (comparison of m-2 to m-1 provided the month before)
• comparisons with other relevant monthly or quarterly data
• questionnaire consistency check (production + imports – exports +/- stock change for up/down data)
• relative importance (%) of estimated data to actual/collected data
• description of estimation methods
• identification and description of possible data errors (by category if possible)

b. Timeliness

c. Accessibility and clarity of information

• is information published at national level?

d. Comparability and coherence of statistics

• comparison of national definition with the Joint Oil Data Definitions

e. Completeness/coverage

• national market coverage
• completeness of the submitted questionnaires (flows)
• difficulties in particular flows

f. Description of other national data quality control methods and proposals for improving data availability and quality at national level.