Poland’s Membership in the United Nations Statistical Commission
Poland will serve, for the first time in 30 years, as a member of the United Nations Statistical Commission for a three-year term starting in 2025.
The United Nations Statistical Commission was established in 1946 by Resolution 8 (I) of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Its main role is to assist ECOSOC – one of the UN’s six principal organs – in coordinating statistical activities carried out by the various bodies of the United Nations.
The Commission brings together all key actors of the global statistical system and is the highest international body setting standards for official statistical activities. Its mandate also includes supporting the development of concepts and methods for implementing these standards at the national level, in order to facilitate and improve the comparability of statistical data.
The Statistical Commission oversees the work of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), which is part of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and forms part of the UN Secretariat supporting ECOSOC’s activities.
The United Nations Statistics Division compiles and disseminates global statistical information, develops norms and standards for statistical activities, and supports the efforts of UN Member States to strengthen their national statistical systems.
At the same time, the United Nations Statistical Commission is the key decision-making body for the coordination of international statistical activities within the global statistical system. Its work is aimed above all at supporting the development of national statistical systems and of new methods and standards in this field, as well as assisting the global statistical system in compiling consistent and comparable statistical data produced by Member States in line with those methods and standards. The resulting national data are transmitted to the statistical databases of the Statistics Division and to specialised UN agencies. On this basis, numerous analyses and publications are prepared, covering a wide range of statistical domains.
Poland’s official statistics also supply data to UNSD databases. During the annual plenary sessions of the Commission, attended by the heads of national statistical offices of UN Member States (including the President of Statistics Poland), as well as representatives of non-Member States (e.g. the Holy See and Palestine), UN regional commissions, international organisations and Eurostat (represented by its Director-General), the main directions for the development of the global statistical system are discussed.