The re­sults of the 2011 cen­sus should be re­leased one year af­ter its com­ple­tion next Feb­ru­ary. This will be a record. It is un­like pre­vi­ous years where cen­sus re­sults were re­leased in four to sev­en years af­ter the cen­sus was tak­en. The last cen­sus was done in 2000. Dave Clement, di­rec­tor of the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO), told the Busi­ness Guardian in his of­fice on Mon­day at the CSO's head of­fice in Port-of-Spain that de­spite the chal­lenges, the CSO is aim­ing for ef­fi­cien­cy and wants to ?pro­duce re­sults in a time­ly man­ner.

"In the pre­vi­ous cen­sus, the re­sults were re­leased in four to sev­en years. We are com­mit­ted to giv­ing the re­sults af­ter the cen­sus next year. It is an am­bi­tious tar­get," he said. He de­scribed the cen­sus as "very cost­ly," es­ti­mat­ing the bill at $83 mil­lion. "This is over a three-year pe­ri­od since the unit was es­tab­lished. This would be from 2009 un­til the re­sults are re­alised in 2012. Even af­ter that, there will be need for data­base dis­sem­i­na­tion. The bulk of mon­ey will be spent on things like pay­ing the thou­sands of field staff," he said.

Readi­ness

Speak­ing on the pre­pared­ness of the CSO for the cen­sus–which will be­gin in Jan­u­ary–Clement said the CSO is on tar­get. "I don't think any­body is ever ful­ly pre­pared for a na­tion­al cen­sus be­cause it's such a large na­tion­al ex­er­cise. There are many vari­ables to ad­dress, but we are on tar­get." There will be dif­fer­ent lev­els of of­fi­cers in the field. Clement said there are zone co-or­di­na­tors, un­der whom are tech­ni­cal su­per­vi­sors, fol­lowed by the ed­i­tors and enu­mer­a­tors. For each enu­mer­a­tion dis­trict, which is 150 to 200 house­holds, the CSO will as­sign one enu­mer­a­tor. Based on this, five enu­mer­a­tors will be su­per­vised by a su­per­vi­sor. A tech­ni­cal area su­per­vi­sor then su­per­vis­es five su­per­vi­sors." The to­tal num­ber of peo­ple hired for the cen­sus is large. Enu­mer­a­tors in the field alone will be 3,064. "When you add it up, there could be a to­tal of 4,093 per­sons em­ployed," Clement said.

Chal­lenges for 2011 cen­sus

Clement called up­on the man­age­ment of gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties to make con­tact with the CSO for the enu­mer­a­tion of house­holds in their com­mu­ni­ties. "Some of them, when you go to the gate, you can't get in and we can't get ac­cess to hous­es in­side." Added to this is the prob­lem of the?enu­mer­a­tion of crime hotspots. Clement said the hous­es in some ar­eas are far apart, and get­ting to them would be dif­fi­cult. He said il­le­gal im­mi­grants are al­so a prob­lem for the cen­sus be­cause they are "un­doc­u­ment­ed and want to re­main so." "They al­ways sus­pect ex­er­cis­es like this will im­pact them. Al­so, there are the non-Eng­lish speak­ing im­mi­grants: like Chi­nese, Fil­ipinos and Colom­bians. We are not in­ter­est­ed in their sta­tus. There is not a sin­gle ques­tion in the ques­tion­naire that ad­dress­es their sta­tus. It's sim­ply about their age and re­li­gious back­grounds." Clement al­so called for the en­tire pop­u­la­tion to take part in the na­tion­al cen­sus. "We need every one to take part in this ex­er­cise. The Unit­ed States did their own ear­li­er this year and is now mop­ping up their re­sults. In the re­gion, the Ba­hamas has done theirs. So we here need to com­plete our own."

House­hold bud­getary sur­vey

Re­sults of the last house­hold bud­getary sur­vey (HBS), con­duct­ed over a year, were re­leased by the CSO in 2009. Based on this da­ta, Clement said the re­tail price in­dex (RPI) is in the process of be­ing re­based and re­vised. "I hope by the mid­dle of 2011, this process should be com­plet­ed," he said. The base year of the cur­rent in­dex is 2003. Dur­ing the HBS, the CSO did sam­ples of house­holds every two weeks. "We asked peo­ple to main­tain a di­ary on how much they spent. They record­ed all their items of ex­pen­di­tures and they were sup­posed to have kept their re­ceipts and things like that. About 7,000 house­holds were mon­i­tored," Clement said. The CSO is present­ly us­ing the da­ta from the HBS to de­ter­mine the im­por­tant items the ma­jor­i­ty of house­holds con­sume and what ac­counts for the great­est share of house­hold ex­pen­di­ture.

Clement said the present in­dex of re­tail prices con­sists of 12 dif­fer­ent sec­tions, in­clud­ing food and non-al­co­holic bev­er­ages, home own­er­ship and house­hold fur­nish­ings. "There may be not nec­es­sar­i­ly be new sec­tions, but there may be new items added un­der a par­tic­u­lar sec­tion. Like un­der com­mu­ni­ca­tion sec­tion, tra­di­tion­al­ly there was land­line and now cell­phones have been added. It's about the phone, the pack­ages peo­ple are tak­ing, the ac­ces­sories. All those things were not as sig­nif­i­cant in 2003." Clement de­fend­ed the CSO from crit­ics who say the RPI is?"a waste of time" and is in­ef­fec­tive. "We iden­ti­fy what items we are go­ing to mon­i­tor and we mon­i­tor these items through­out the life of the in­dex. We can't sim­ply can't bring in or change items in the mid­dle of an in­dex. It can on­ly be done when re­bas­ing. "Once the in­dex has start­ed with a de­fined list of items, which we call the in­di­ca­tor items, those are the items which we con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor dur­ing life of in­dex," he said.

Right now the CSO is at the stage of iden­ti­fy­ing the im­por­tant items from the HBS and then to de­ter­mine the weights. This is the ex­pen­di­ture of a sec­tion in re­la­tion to to­tal ex­pen­di­ture in all items in all sec­tions. Clement said he does not want to draw any con­clu­sions at this stage of the process, but not­ed that, in the last in­dex, sec­tions like food and hous­ing made up sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­ages of the en­tire ex­pen­di­ture. In the case of the sec­tion of hous­ing, wa­ter, elec­tric­i­ty, gas and oth­er fu­els was 26.2 per cent and, food and non-al­co­holic bev­er­ages was 18 per cent. Af­ter they would work out the item weight, the next stage would be to cal­cu­late each item as a per­cent­age of each sec­tion. Re­ply­ing to the ques­tion of whether food as a per­cent­age of to­tal ex­pen­di­ture of all sec­tions has in­creased, he laughed and said he would not "spec­u­late" on that as yet. "I have learnt in sta­tis­tics that you do not spec­u­late un­til you get the num­bers. You may be think­ing things go a cer­tain way and when you get the num­bers, you may get a dif­fer­ent pat­tern. We go on em­pir­i­cal ev­i­dence. Any­thing else is spec­u­la­tion," he said.

Chal­lenges

Clement said that times have evolved and the CSO has much more re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and de­mands to meet. "There has been an in­crease in de­mand for sta­tis­tics from var­i­ous stake­hold­ers and the struc­ture from which we pro­duce our sta­tis­tics is a struc­ture set up in 1972. The de­mand for sta­tis­tics then to now has grown tremen­dous­ly. The CSO is in need of re­struc­tur­ing and staffing," he said. Re­cent­ly, Clement was in a meet­ing of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee of Sta­tis­ti­cians in Do­mini­ca for the Caribbean re­gion. He said T&T is not be­hind any oth­er sta­tis­ti­cal of­fice in the re­gion. "T&T is among the lead­ers in sta­tis­ti­cal of­fices in the re­gion de­spite the chal­lenges we face. This process of re­struc­tur­ing will be in the near fu­ture. I won't say we are lag­ging be­hind any­one," he said.

One main prob­lem in the CSO he iden­ti­fied is time­li­ness. "That's is a func­tion of hu­man re­sources and tech­nol­o­gy. We con­stant­ly try to up­grade new tech­nol­o­gy. We in­tro­duced scan­ning, which in­volves scan­ning ques­tion­naires. Be­fore da­ta en­try had to be done man­u­al­ly. "We are al­so look­ing at au­to­mat­ed cod­ing. We are al­so get­ting as­sis­tance from UN in this area. They are help­ing us with an ap­pli­ca­tion to speed up cod­ing of the in­for­ma­tion," he said. In Oc­to­ber, the CSO won an award from World Bank for plac­ing first in the re­gion in de­vel­op­ing an ap­pli­ca­tion for pro­cess­ing of trade sta­tis­tics. "It was award­ed on World Sta­tis­tics Day, which was 20/10/2010," he said.