In Soviet times, in the country there was a single, precise communicating and centrally funded system of the State Statistics Committee, including federal, state and local government statistics. The main purpose of functioning of this system was to provide all levels of public authorities with statistical information. The adoption in 1995 of the Federal Law 154-FL "On general principles of local self-government in the Russian Federation" was the beginning of the development of local governance in the post-Soviet period, and municipal statistics in the Russian Federation was no longer considered as part of the state statistics. In the 1990s-2000s, recognizing the lack of statistical information on the municipal level as a major problem, local governments and their associations tried to create their own database to determine the approaches to the construction of an integrated system of indicators of municipal statistics. The most notable projects of that period, suitable for use in the practice of local government, were the Inventory Book of Territory, the framework of which was worked out at Kuban State University and a database formed by the Association of Siberian and Far East cities on the basis of socio-economic situation indicators in the municipalities. Since 2006, in Russian Federation began a new stage of the municipal statistics database reformation. Municipal statistics, as the main part of the administrative activity of local self-government receives an independent character in terms of forms of organization of statistical observation, in strict compliance with the requirements of the state statistics to the methodology and presentation of statistical data. The number of indicators by which the information uploads into the database of municipalities increased from 198 in 2007 to 652 in 2015. However, despite the overall increase in the number of statistical indicators, the municipal statistics matrix is highly rarefied, most of the indicators are not represented for the entire period, due to the fact that some indicators were introduced later, and some, on the contrary, were removed from the number of the recorded. So, in the database for urban districts, about 30 % of local matters are not appropriately covered by statistics, and there is no statistical information on the basis of municipal property reforming. The main priority in formation and development of municipal statistics, as claimed by the federal and regional levels of governance, is to develop a database to monitor the effectiveness of the local government of city districts and municipal areas. The most important problems in the development of municipal statistics are related to financing of this process, also of methodological problems, and of the enclosed character of public authorities from each other and from local governments.

Управленческие решения, принимаемые всеми уровнями власти, должны базироваться на объективных данных о текущей ситуации. В современной России сформировался серьезный дисбаланс в обеспечении информацией государственных (федеральных, региональных) и муниципальных органов власти. Выявлены причины возникновения информационной асимметрии, показано состояние муниципальной статистики в части описания социальных, экономических, демографических и иных общественных процессов в муниципалитетах. Предлагается в процессе формирования официальных статистических данных усилить роль муниципальной статистики, внедрять практику межведомственного обмена информацией.