The use of information from experts for agricultural official statistics

Expert information is a source of information widely used by the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) in order to satisfy the request of statistics on crops at NUTS3 level. One of the characteristics of this source of information could be considered the opportunity to have information on phenomena that are difficult or prohibitively expensive to observe (e.g. estimate of very specific crops at a very disaggregated territorial level) as well as better timeliness with respect to traditional surveys. Furthermore, expert information can be easily integrated with traditional data sources. In this framework, a prominent problem is the evaluation of the quality of statistics produced using expert information and to understand on what conditions this source can be fruitfully used in official statistics, in combination with traditional statistical sources (when necessary). In fact, differently from current practices on “usual” survey strategies based on sample surveys or on administrative data, expert information is not complemented by a solid set of rules for the quality evaluation of the produced results. Nowadays, the literature on elicitation (that is the process to gain information from experts) offers many alternatives (Garthwaite et al, 2005). In this paper, after a review of the Italian experience in the use of this type of source, the role that a modern elicitation methods can play in the production of official statistics will be evaluated and a set of quality indicators that could be issued together with the produced statistics will be proposed.