Israel Central Bureau of Statistics

The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics is Israel’s national statistical bureau. Its responsibilities include collecting, processing, and publishing information on the country’s population, economy, and society for policymakers and the public.[1][2]

The CBS operates under the Statistics Ordinance (New Version), 5732–1972. Its statutory functions include producing and publishing statistics on subjects such as health, wellbeing, education, the economy, and physical, geographic, and ecological indices. It also coordinates with government offices and other bodies, prepares multi-year plans for state statistical activity in consultation with the Public Council for Statistics, and works with relevant bodies on uniform statistical classifications.[2]

The bureau is headed by a National Statistician, who also serves as its director. The Public Council for Statistics accompanies its professional and scientific work.[2][8]

The Council provides a continuing forum for statistical producers and users from government, local administration, business, research, professional unions, and other public institutions. It discusses broad issues in plenary sessions and establishes advisory boards on particular subjects. Its functions include advising ministers and the National Statistician, reviewing plans and coordination among state bodies, and proposing ways to develop and improve government statistical activity.[8]

The CBS was established several months after the founding of the State of Israel as an autonomous unit within the Prime Minister’s Office. It continued the work of statistical departments that had operated under the British Mandate government and the Jewish Agency for Israel.[2]

The Public Council for Statistics was founded in 1963 and received legal status in 1978 after an amendment to the Statistics Ordinance. It has between 50 and 80 members appointed by the Prime Minister on the National Statistician’s recommendation, drawn from government, local authorities, higher education, and other public bodies involved in or dependent on statistical work.[8]

The CBS distinguishes between primary data, collected directly for official statistical purposes, and secondary data, initially gathered by public or private organizations for administrative or commercial purposes and later used to produce official statistics. Censuses and sample surveys are among its primary collection methods. The bureau also identifies digital-platform, smart-device, and online activity—including mobile-phone and social-network data—as newer forms of secondary information.[2]

Population estimates draw on censuses and subsequent changes recorded in the Population Registry. Since the end of 2023, estimates have been based on the 2022 Census. Address-based information has limitations: residents may fail to report a move, potentially understating population in new neighborhoods where growth largely comes from moves within the same locality.[9]

The CBS has conducted its Social Survey annually since 2002. The survey covers living conditions and welfare as well as people’s perceptions of aspects of their lives. It is a sample survey of the permanent population aged 20 and over, based on the Population Registry, and excludes certain population groups.[9]

The bureau also maintains a microdata research room where researchers can process data for analysis. A Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research yearbook team used the room, with CBS staff guidance, to process migration, employment, and population microdata instead of requesting customized tables. The Institute described this approach as demanding extra caution while providing more options for research.[10]

The Statistical Yearbook of Israel is cataloged as a Jerusalem publication issued by the CBS from 2020 onward, available online and in Hebrew; its catalog record lists print availability through 2017. The Statistical Abstracts of Israel is cataloged as an electronic resource published in Hebrew and English from 2002 onward, with a paper edition for 2001–2006.[11][12]

The Monthly Bulletin of Statistics began in 1949, and its title changed in 1960. From 1959 it appeared in four sections: social statistics, economic statistics, foreign trade, and prices. In January 1967, social and economic statistics were combined, while foreign-trade and price statistics remained separate. English summaries had appeared from 1954; the bulletin was issued on CD-ROM from 2005 to 2007 and has been available electronically since 2018.[13]

By April 1997, a CBS deputy director described the bureau’s website as making databases available to the public free of charge, alongside monthly bulletins, press releases, search tools, advance release calendars, and simultaneous data publication.[1]

The bureau’s online tools include tables, charts, maps, a time-series databank and search, an application programming interface, downloadable exports and imports data, price-index databases, linkage calculations, and a Social Survey table generator. It also provides generators for the 2022 and 2008 censuses.[3] The 2022 Census data site lets users examine information at geographic levels ranging from the national and district level to localities, quarters, sub-quarters, and statistical areas, and compare geographic units or censuses.[14]

CBS statistics serve ministries and local authorities in planning and policymaking across areas including education, health, welfare, housing, construction, transport, and public services. Other identified users include international organizations, researchers, public and private companies, journalists, students, and the general public. Uses range from studying demographic and socioeconomic trends and conducting market research to reporting and personal decisions such as where to live or study.[2]

Independence, reliability, and strict confidentiality of personal data are the bureau’s stated guiding principles. It describes itself as an apolitical, independent, professional body, says it uses scientific methods based on international professional standards, and states that it has adopted strict International Monetary Fund rules for disseminating statistics. It does not transmit personal information about residents or specific business information about companies and corporations.[2]

Under the Statistics Ordinance, the bureau has defined procedures and duties concerning its mission, the public’s obligation to provide requested information, confidentiality, and publication of results. Sections 11–15a require people, businesses, and public bodies to cooperate with surveys. Refusal to provide required information is an offense under Section 22, punishable by up to three months’ imprisonment where no other penalty is specified.[4]

The law bars the CBS from transmitting information that could identify an individual respondent to another authority and requires it to keep received information confidential. Submitted data cannot be used as evidence against a citizen or in court, and courts must disregard such information even if it was disclosed accidentally or through negligence.[4]

The bureau argues that compulsory participation helps preserve representative statistics. It selects a minimum sample size for reliable results, with each person or business in the sample representing others with similar characteristics. In its example, nonparticipation in a household expenditure survey can affect representation in the consumer basket used to calculate the Consumer Price Index and monthly rent values.[4]

A notable early example of the CBS’s role in government planning followed the Six-Day War. An INSS account says that in June 1967 bureau director Roberto Bachi met with representatives of government and security bodies to discuss a census in territories captured during the war. The census was approved on July 11 and conducted in stages in the Gaza Strip and in the northern and southern parts of the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—from September 10 to 29.[5]

The same account describes the census as serving government interests in gathering demographic information for possible diplomatic negotiations and for the authorities administering the territories. Census-takers made about 200,000 home visits and asked demographic and economic questions; a longer interview was conducted in a representative sample of 20 percent of homes.[5]

The article reports counts of 602,607 people in the West Bank, including 107,566 refugees, and 392,563 in the Gaza Strip, including 204,855 refugees. It attributes a substantial gap between the West Bank count and prior expectations to a rule requiring people to be physically present at home to be counted as residents, and says those absent from the territories were consequently excluded. These figures and explanations are reported here as claims from that account.[5]

The CBS also contributed statistical work to a government-appointed committee on the development of the administered territories. The committee included Bachi alongside economists Michael Bruno and Don Patinkin, sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, and mathematician Aryeh Dvoretzky. Its economic and social research drew on demographic, economic, and social data, including information the CBS began collecting.[5]

Statistical methods can affect reported population figures. The CBS revised its classification of Israelis as having emigrated after finding that the previous rule—a stay abroad of 365 consecutive days—could misclassify both people taking long visits abroad and people who left permanently but returned briefly. The revised approach allows for short visits. Globes reported that the change raised the estimated number of Israelis who had left by about 105,000, or 1.1% of the population, compared with the original 2022 Census figures.[6]

A separate discrepancy concerned arrivals and departures between July and October 2023. Globes reported that CBS figures showed arrivals exceeding departures by about 90,000, while figures from the Population and Immigration Authority showed departures exceeding arrivals by 554. The Authority recorded border crossings and forwarded data to the CBS; the agencies differed over which figures were more reliable. The CBS said differences in definitions, periods, or collection dates can produce discrepancies.[6]

The bureau’s independence also became a subject of political debate. A 2023 Globes editorial reported an attempt to appoint Yossi Shelley, then director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, as acting Chief Statistician, and characterized it as a threat to the CBS’s perceived independence. That characterization was the editorial’s assessment, not a finding established in its report.[7]

In 2016, a government resolution made the CBS the sole government body authorized to publish indices of home-price changes, effective October 1, and called for the statistics to be presented clearly to the public. Globes reported that the Finance Ministry argued multiple housing indices caused confusion, while real-estate-sector participants and an appraisers’ association representative opposed the decision.[15]