The paper explores the philosophical underpinnings of the ethics of official statistics and provides a basic conceptual classification. It distinguishes between universal ethics, supranational codifications, and national/local ethics, and examines these distinctions through various philosophical perspectives. The paper emphasizes that ethics of official statistics can only be fully understood in the context of their foundational objective(s), whether universal or alternative. It proposes that the process of discovering ethics involves critique and reformulation to address deficiencies, given that local approaches often lead to statistical quality that is inconsistent with the demands of globalization and integration for highly reliable and internationally comparable statistics produced as a global public good.

The manipulation of official statistics is grand corruption and political corruption. There is a mechanism that gives rise to phenomena of corruption in official statistics and has component parts: the drivers, the enabling conditions, the modalities and methods used to arrive at the phenomena, and the vectors or agents that execute or propagate the phenomena. The main focus of this article is the drivers, that is, the interests and incentives of those directly or indirectly involved in phenomena of corruption in official statistics, and without which these phenomena would not arise. To attenuate drivers (which will always be present) we propose to foster a culture of statistical ethics through specific steps of education and socialization, as well as laws and institutional setups supportive of statistical ethics.

A union of states is there for various reasons but a fundamental one is to provide public goods that cannot be provided optimally by actions at the level of individual states. Such union-level public goods would be, for example, defence of the union against aggression by other states from outside it, protection against infectious diseases spreading in the union, regulation of massive population flows into the union, and safeguarding of financial and macroeconomic stability of the union. These kinds of goods are characterised by two important qualities so that they can be classified as public goods at the level of a union of states: ‘nonrivalness’ and ‘nonexcludability’. These concepts have been elementary concepts of economics since the work of the renowned economist Paul Samuelson in the 1950s.