Ex-professor overhauling statistics office

By Cho Jin-seo

Staff reporter

The nation’s statistics office is undergoing a major overhaul as the first female chief of the office has stepped up efforts to make its database more business friendly.

The move to make more industry data available to the public, led by Statistics Korea Commissioner Yi In-sill, comes as many business leaders have complained about the office’s database lacking business-related statistics.

At a lunch meeting with reporters, Wednesday, Yi said the business statistics service will open as early as September, and firms will be able to get useful analyses about their industries and customers.

“We have completed putting together a single database containing some 200 million time-series items, and are now processing it to make it look better,” she said. “It is true that we have had some weak points in our business statistics system, and we want to improve them.”

Businesses use statistically collected and analyzed data to get useful insights on their and other firms’ financial and operational performance. The data is also widely used in marketing and sales ― in studying the behavior or consumers and the market.

Yi, an academic from Sogang University, was appointed the nation’s chief statistician in May 2009. She has been credited for implementing various reform measures at Statistics Korea including changing its English name from National Statistics Office, which she thought was too bureaucratic.

Currently, the office is providing various economic, geographical and demographic statistics to citizens on its Web site and publications, but there is no section on corporate data.

Financial data of individual businesses are available in their public disclosures uploaded at the Financial Supervisory Services (FSS)’ Web site (https://dart.fss.or.kr/), but there is no collective statistical analysis of them. Some core statistics on financial firms, such as banks, insurance firms and stock trading firms can be found at the FSS’s other Web site (https://fisis.fss.or.kr/) but it is far from comprehensive and focuses on financial firms only. Furthermore, the data are often not up to date.

Yi said that there have been requests for improvements from the business circle.

“I was once sitting next to an executive from Samsung Heavy Industries. He asked me whether we had some specific industrial statistics, saying that it could help them to win a contract,” she said.

As the necessary raw data are already compiled into a single system, the next step is to filter out sensitive information. “There are worries that if we openly provide business statistics, one may identify individual firms in it by looking at certain entries, such as revenue. So we are going to process the data in order to ensure security,” she said.

Yi said that Canada and Australia are leading nations in the field of business statistics.

She also told the reporters that her office is working on a project to create a new, more comprehensive national wealth index, which would replace the gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is frequently criticized in that it does not effectively reflect the quality of life as it focuses on the quantity of industrial production only.