Background

From June 1981 to July 1984 the Centre for Applied Statistics (CAS) at the University of Lancaster held three one-year contracts with the Statistical Office of the European Communities in Luxembourg. The aim of these contracts was to determine whether mathematical models could be used to summarise the information on, and reduce the volume of tabulation of, unemployment rates from the biennial Labour Force Survey published by the Statistical Office.

The results of these studies are presented elsewhere (Aitkin and Healey, 1984b,1985), and are fully documented in the contract reports on the three individual studies (Aitkin and Healey, 1982, 1983, 1984a). In this chapter we briefly describe the two contracting organisations, the terms of reference of the studies, how the studies were managed, and the use made of the results.

The Statistical Office of the European Communities

The Statistical Office of the European Communities (abbreviated hereafter to the multilingual acronym EUROSTAT) is a large directorate of the European Economic Community responsible for collating and disseminating information about the activities of the member states of the EEC.

EUROSTAT appoints its staff from the Statistical Offices of individual member countries, and by direct recruitment for specialised positions. EUROSTAT has the responsibility for collating the information collected by the central statistical offices of the EEC member countries, particularly that from the very large Labour Force, Structure of Earnings and Agriculture surveys; for ensuring the consistency of the definitions used as the basis of the national surveys; and for publishing the collated results through the Office of Official Publications, EUROSTAT's own publishing house.