What is official statistics?

Official statistics are at the heart of daily life with its immense production of figures. However, it is often confused with statistics emanating from the private sphere, like surveys on voting intentions or on the priorities of the French. In fact, official statistics have a history, which goes back to the ancient practice of counting the workforce of cities and states that need information to better know and govern themselves. With the establishment of large-scale data collection and coherent databases, methods have been refined: development of sampling techniques, birth of econometrics, big data shift…