Statistics are not just simple numbers / Day

You have relatively recently been approved as the head of CSB – what is your view on CSB’s current and future role in the management and use of various data available in the country. It seems that CSB is the institution where no major innovative revolution can be made, it is a specific institution, you work with different types of numbers, so to speak – dry numbers, their compilation, storage. Behind these numbers, of course, there are real people, a real business.

You mentioned those dry numbers. It should be taken into account here that part of the amount of information – about half of what CSB works with – are polls that contain sentiments, people’s opinions. For these numbers, when represented in this way, of course, the population is a number. But one such very valuable tool is, for example, the sense of entrepreneurs about what is happening in the economy.

This is the so-called sentiment measurement measured by LTRK?

Yes, CSB conducts these surveys, LTRK also measures this sentiment themselves. And it is a broad survey in which residents, businessmen are interviewed about their feelings, what is the current situation, what are their future forecasts, for example, how the sales of products will change. And you can see from this sentiment that these people’s feelings have a very strong correlation with GDP – the actual GDP data then follows [atbilst] for this feeling.

A common criticism of statistics is that they are just bare numbers. No! What is missing [statistisko datu apkopojumā], of course, there are stories. Analysts already do this, they also add emotions and stories to their presentations. But we work not only with the number of people, we also have data about what people think, what they want.