ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the context that summarizes the institutional developments that occurs in the field of government statistics up to the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on the discourse held by statistical reformers of the early twentieth century. The period of the First World War and its immediate aftermath was indeed a critical juncture. The chapter takes into account a large number of countries and seeks to identify the factors that led to the establishment of a centralized, a decentralized or a coordinated system of statistics. The establishment of national statistical systems from the early nineteenth century to the Second World War and of the debates that surrounded it among government statisticians. The specific issues that concerns is that of the dissemination of statistical thinking, but rather that of the organizational features of national statistical systems which faces with the changing data requirements set by the state and civil society.
