About our work
Current threats to federal data collection and production of statistics have created real potential for a short-term crisis. Without high-quality economic indicators, policymakers, businesses, and families will be left in the dark when it comes to making decisions about the future. Meanwhile, amid chaotic news cycles and partisan turmoil, questions of how key economic indicators are produced, what indicators are needed to guide policy, and who should be involved in producing those indicators have taken a backseat to political headlines.
In response to these concerns, the Economic Indicators Initiative (EII) has been established to build up insights, proposals, and consensus about how to strengthen the production of key economic indicators.
The immediate focus of the EII is developing ideas and methods to improve the production of official economic statistics related to quality, measurement, and governance. That includes:
- Documenting emerging threats to our current system for producing economic indicators,
- Improving public understanding of how economic indicators are used and what additional indicators may be needed,
- Increasing trust in the system for producing economic indicators, and
- Developing a framework for evaluating ideas and proposed methods for official government statistics.
Ultimately, the EII’s goal is to help ensure trustworthy statistics and quality data, both now and in the future. Meeting that challenge begins with consensus-building research on improving key U.S. economic indicators, but that research must and will be targeted toward driving real change.
Meet our team
Project lead
Initiative collaborators
Research support
Initiative partners
Acknowledgements
The Economic Indicators Initiative gratefully acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation for this important work.