4.8 Statistical Office founded in Finland

The precursor of the Central Statistical Office of Finland was established in 1865 in the shape of a temporary Statistical Office. Karl Ferdinand Ignatius was appointed the first head of the new agency, which was to assume central responsibility for the handling of data that used to be spread out across several different government bodies. By this time population statistics had been collected for more than one hundred years in almost identical form. A similar lack of determined development efforts was seen in other areas of statistics as well.

Several proposals had been put forward for the revision of population statistics, for the content of the data collected no longer met current needs. Furthermore, the population information collected from church registers was not comparable with that gathered in connection with domicile registration. The idea of a population census based on person forms covering the whole country was brought up frequently. It was suggested that information on population changes be collected by means of individual-based forms instead of summaries. Sweden had started collecting individual-based information as early as the 1850s.

Following the foundation of the Statistical Office, publishing started on a regular basis as well. The publication of population statistics on an annual basis got under way with the Official Statistics of Finland (OSF) series VI, with the first publication "Suomen väestö Joulukuun 31 p. 1865" (The population of Finland on 31 December 1865) coming out in 1870. Since then population statistics were released regularly and information on population changes was published separately for each year.