National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus

History of Belstat goes back to 1919 when the Minsk regional statistical bureau was transformed into the Central statistical department of the Belarusian SSR. This organization was reorganized many times in the Soviet era. In 1991, the State Committee of Statistics and Analysis of Belarusian SSR was reorganized into the eponymous organization of the Republic of Belarus. In 1994, the Committee was reorganized into the Ministry of statistics and analysis, in 2008 it was reorganized into the National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus. ==Activities==

Belstat has 7 regional subsidiaries (one in every voblast (region) and in Minsk) which collect data from the legal entities based in the region. The committee and its predecessors were involved in organizing and conduction of censuses during the Soviet era (1926, 1937, 1939, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1989) and in the independent Belarus (1999, 2009, 2019). National Archives of Belarus keeps c. 1500 volumes of documents of 1926 census which contain valuable genealogical information. ==Criticism==

Belstat is often criticized for the lack of transparency. In 2020—2021, Belstat stopped to publish some of the statistical information, presumably for political reasons. For many years, Belstat didn't calculate the number of unemployed people in Belarus according to international standards. This feature was related to the official guideline that there is no unemployment in Belarus. Belstat denied to comment this fact to journalists. In August 2021, anti-government hackers got access to several internal databases and copied them. These leaked databases became the only source of reliable information about the number of excess deaths which turned out to be 17 times higher than officially stated number of deaths from COVID-19. Economist and demographer Anatoly Zlotnikov analysed the lack of reliable data through the established policy that "positive" statistical data is propagated and "negative" is usually avoided to read out. He also suggested that Belstat tried not to provoke panic. == References==