Strategy to modernise agricultural statistics: new pathways for the future – 2023 edition

The growing number of challenges posed by emerging user needs, new data sources and technological progress calls for a rethinking of the way agricultural statistics are produced in the near future. This report outlines the current endeavours to modernise the core business processes of agricultural statistics within European statistical system. Moreover, we develop a user integrated dissemination process by proposing a modern approach to evaluate the statistical products as a function of user attention. Based on user metrics recorded between January 2020 and 2023, we explore page views and user engagements from social media of most accessible statistical dissemination products in the realm of agriculture. The exploratory analysis manifest that a short number of tables account for more than half of user hits within all domains. Linking user engagements from social media posts with page views of news items reveals a heterogeneous distribution of issue attention. While there is a strong and positive relationship between statistics explained articles and the associated tables, our results indicate that users prefer crosscutting rather than specialised topics. These findings are discussed within the modernisation framework.