Walter Radermacher

Walter J. Radermacher is a German statistician. He was President of the German Federal Statistical Office and Director General of Eurostat and is Professor (hon.) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Career
After completing his studies in business administration in Aachen and Münster, Radermacher joined the German Federal Statistical Office in 1978. Radermacher gained his first experience in trade statistics and, in particular, in the planning and implementation of the 1985 trade census, the first large-scale census in Germany after the 1983 census judgement. He was then involved in the implementation of modern geo-information systems in official statistics. In the 1990s, he built up the Environmental Economic Accounts at the Federal Statistical Office.

From 2001 to mid-2003 was Head of Administration at the Federal Statistical Office. Radermacher was appointed Vice President of the Federal Statistical Office at the end of 2003 and President in December 2006.

As President of the Federal Statistical Office, Radermacher also took over the chairmanship of the Council of the European Union Working Group on Statistics for the period of the German EU Council Presidency (1st half of 2007). During his inauguration (18 January 2007), Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble also appointed Radermacher as Federal Returning Officer with effect from 19 January 2007.

Radermacher was appointed Director General of Eurostat on 1 August 2008. He remained in office until the end of 2016 and was succeeded by Mariana Kotzeva in 2018.

From 2017 to 2022, he was a researcher at the Institute of Statistical Sciences at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he obtained his PhD in 2019. He was President of the Federation of European National Statistical Societies (FENStatS) from 2017 to 2023 and has been its vice president since September 2023.

Since 2022, he has been Head of the advisory board on Ethics of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and Professor (hon.) at the Statistics Institute of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Radermacher is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society 2023.

Research
Radermacher is the author of numerous publications in the field of statistics and the book Official Statistics 4.0 - Verified Facts for People in the 21st Century.