The Census of Ordinance of 1880 constituted the first statistical legislation for Singapore. A legal framework for the collection, preparation and publication of official statistics was put in place only in 1921 with the enactment of the Statistics Ordinance, which provided for the establishment of a Statistical Bureau. The Bureau has developed and grown to become the Singapore Department of Statistics.
Under the purview of the MTI, the Department of Statistics is the government agency responsible for collecting statistics and analyzing statistical trends, and monitoring social and economic trends and developments in Singapore.
