Abstract

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) conducted a review of the national statistical system of Mongolia initiated early 2023 and published in May 2024. One of the recommendations emanating from the review was that the National Statistics Office (NSO) of the country developed and implemented a quality assurance strategy that ensured that all statistical processes were documented; quality reviews were implemented and resulted in actionable improvement plans; and that these improvement plans were implemented under close monitoring. The review provided other recommendations, including with respect to the revision of the law on official statistics and the institutional structure of the national statistical system, which required implementation for the extension of the strategy to the entire system.

This article describes the strategy that the NSO, with the continuing support of ESCAP, has been developing and starting to implement since mid-2024, explaining that it comprises two main components, namely enhancing the validity of statistical processes, and enhancing the validity of statistical outputs of a defined process, with a view to implement these components in a cycle over three-year periods.

Expounding on the first component, the article explains that it builds on work undertaken by the NSO — in many cases with the support of various development partners — prior to the review to improve the quality of official statistics, and what additional measures have been designed to transform these building blocks into a coherent system to ensure the validity of the statistical processes. In doing so, the article elaborates specifically on the use made — with necessary adaptations and the development of an administering tool — of the United Nations National Quality Assurance Framework (NQAF) checklist adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission at its 50th session in 2019.

The article concludes with considering the sustainability of the strategy in the context of Mongolia where resources for the production and dissemination of official statistics are limited.