ISTAT (National Institute of Statistics)

The National Institute of Statistics is the major Italian supplier of official statistics. A public research corporation, ISTAT takes censuses, carries out investigations and surveys, and processes the relative information. Its production and dissemination of information complies with the fundamental principles of official statistics: impartiality, reliability, pertinence, efficiency, confidentiality and transparency.

ISTAT cooperates with the Development and Cohesion Policies Department (DPS) of the Ministry of Economic Development, with a view to ensuring a significant increase in the availability of official statistics at a territorial level. The services it renders include the implementation of a data bank of regional indicators for the development policies: over 100 multi-thematic regional indicators, available by axes of intervention and priority ambits in the Community Support Framework (CSF). With reference to infrastructures, ISTAT is implementing a project for a data bank that is to store indicators at a provincial level on issues of interest. Dealing with the environment proper, ISTAT has completed a reconnaissance into the state of implementation of the integrated water service as at June 30, 2005. Besides, the Institute is implementing a context information project for integrated territorial policies (INCIPIT) that provides for the setting up of a data bank for the collection and dissemination of information about cultural, tourist, and natural resources, as well as typical and quality productions.

In collaboration with the Public Investment Evaluation Unit of DPS, ISTAT works for “Environmental Accounting and Develop”. The first document “(This link opens an external site) Development policies and environment: using environmental account for better decision meking”, - pdf, 2.54 Mb [it] - carried out on 2005, wants to identify ways in wich environmental accounting can improve the design, monitoring and evaluation of development policies and to hightlight the value-added of this type of data, in comparison to other sources of information on the environment.

In 2004, further to the start-up of an investigation into the environmental monitoring of a few sectors of the CSF, ISTAT has joined the Network. Its involvement originated from the need to outline a methodological framework that might succeed in overcoming the fragmentary character of the databases.