Statistical agencies: a comparison of the U.S. and Canadian statistical systems.

Editor's note: A snapshot of how the statistical systems are organized in the U.S. and Canada was presented to the Committee on the Budget of the House of Representatives in August 1996 by the U.S. General Accounting Office. The report was in response to the committee's request for information on the Canadian statistical system and a comparison with the U.S. system. The following article is excerpted and adapted from that report.

Several differences between the United States and Canada affect work performed by the nations' statistical systems. The United States has a much larger population than Canada has. The United States' population is 264 million, and Canada's population is 29 million. Measured to respective gross domestic products, the U.S. economy, at more than $7 trillion, is also much larger than the Canadian economy, at $611 billion (in U.S. dollars).

The U.S. economy is also substantially more complicated than the Canadian economy. An example of this is seen in the financial sectors of the two economies. Nearly 10,000 domestic banks operate in the United States. The Canadian banking and financial services systems are much more centralized, with six domestic banks. Financial markets in the United States are also more complex. U.S. financial markets often pioneer the use of sophisticated financial instruments, such as derivatives, that make the value of trading particularly difficult to measure.

Canada's parliamentary government can provide a more unified source of direction to its departments and agencies, including Statistics Canada, than can the system of government in the United States. In the Canadian system of government, agencies are directed by members of the Cabinet, who are also members of the majority party in Parliament. Statistics Canada, under the Canadian Constitution, also must respond to provincial governments' statistical needs; by policy, it seeks to meet the public information needs of the private sector. In the United States, the direction of statistical agencies is affected by the constitutional separation of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government and the dispersal of congressional authority among authorizing, appropriation, and oversight committees, which can provide multiple sources of program and budget decisions that affect the U.S. statistical system. Statistics Canada also receives guidance from provincial governments and the private sector.

The federal statistical systems in the United States and Canada are based on different organizational and budget structures. The U.S. statistical system is highly decentralized, while the Canadian system is centralized. Due to the decentralized nature of the U.S. statistical system, each U.S. statistical agency receives current-year appropriations, either as a specific line item in the budget or through allocations from its parent organization's...