The Government approved the statistical actions for the next five years

"80% of the statistical actions organised this year are surveys," said Mr Andres Oopkaup, Director General of Statistics Estonia. Mr Oopkaup mentioned that while producing official statistics the aim should be to use registers as much as possible. “Of statistical actions based on data collection, 60% use the data of registers, of which in turn half are entirely register-based," noted Mr Oopkaup. Mr Oopkaup explained that in case statistics need the information which is not included in the registers or the register data are not suitable for producing statistics, the data must be collected directly from enterprises and organisations. "In 2013, over 40,000 enterprises, institutions and organisations will be submitting the data to Statistics Estonia," said Mr Oopkaup. "When smaller enterprises are selected to be the respondents mainly by random choice, then the enterprises with more than 50 employees and also smaller enterprises which are more important with regard to their economic activity have to submit the reports every year," explained Mr Oopkaup.

As a new statistical action, the services producer price indices, which up to now were included in producer price index, will be published this year. According to the European Union requirements, the services producer price indices of 20 economic activities must be calculated, of which by now 11 (e.g. the producer price index of legal and accounting services and the producer price index of water transport services) are available and two are being worked out. At the proposal of the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Statistical Council, Statistics Estonia has also started to work out the indicators of absolute poverty. At the proposal of the Ministry of Education and Research, in 2013 one of the statistical actions is "Success on the labour market", which provides information on the further career development of the pupils/students, graduates and drop-outs.

Enterprises, institutions and organisations will get information on the questionnaires that they are required to submit in 2013 on Statistics Estonia’s website (only in Estonian). The same questionnaires are available in Statistics Estonia’s electronic data collection channel eSTAT.

The estimated cost of statistical actions in 2013–2017 is 29.6 million euros, this year 6.3 million euros. The list of statistical actions for 2013–2017 has been published on Statistics Estonia’s website (only in Estonian).