SCI Named Sole Authority to Publish Economic Statistics

The Statistical High Council, affiliated to the Plan and Budget Organization of Iran, reaffirmed on Tuesday that the Statistical Center of Iran is the sole authority for producing and publishing the country’s official statistics, including figures on inflation and economic growth rates.  
The council also called on the Central Bank of Iran to put national accounts at the disposal of SCI, IRNA reported.
A long-running dispute over which authority, the Central Bank of Iran or the Statistical Center of Iran, should be responsible for producing the official monetary statistics and macroeconomic indicators reemerged in January when CBI announced it would not publish its data, until further notice, on the Consumer Price Index for the Iranian month ending Dec. 21.
There have often been marked discrepancies between data published by the CBI and those by SCI.
A week later, the Specialized Commission of the Statistical High Council, affiliated to the Plan and Budget Organization of Iran (to which the SCI is a subsidiary), announced that CBI does not have the mandate to produce and disclose statistics on price indexes and national accounts, and must cease their publication to avoid duplicative and overlapping governmental assignments. 
At that time, CBI’s senior statistician, Mahmoud Cheloyan, strongly opposed the SCI announcement, saying that the central regulator will continue to fulfill its constitutional duties to prepare and publish statistics of its own.