At the beginning of the year, the government revealed its 25 year environment plan, the central aim of which is to protect and preserve the UK environment. ONS has a role to play in developing a full set of ‘natural capital’ accounts. Ashley Ward explains the concept of natural capital and what it brings to environmental policy making.
Read more on Moving beyond GDP – explaining natural capital
HMRC has published real time tax information for the first time. ONS Head of Labour Market David Freeman explains the significance of this milestone and writes about how ONS plans to use these data to transform its own labour market statistics.
Read more on Real time tax data: A glimpse into the future of employment and earnings statistics
Statisticians and trade negotiators have been scratching their heads to explain a phenomenon called ‘trade asymmetries’, where different countries’ estimates…
Read more on A global balancing act – exploring the asymmetries in world trade data
As we approach the centenary of women’s suffrage, gender issues remain a topic of fierce interest and debate through issues such as the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and male suicide. Last week, Emma Rourke took part in an event which asked do we have the data we need to make informed decisions on how to tackle issues of gender equality? Here, Emma explains the role data has to play.
Read more on The gender data gap
Recently GDP has come under some close scrutiny for failing to capture unpaid work and the impact of economic growth on the environment. Jonathan Athow looks at GDP’s strengths as well as some other measures and statistics that can be used to understand wider measures of well-being.
Read more on GDP: a worthwhile, but incomplete, measure