In 1856 Bern was the first canton to establish a statistic office, even before the Swiss Confederation. The office should carry out surveys and evaluate the collected data. The collected data focused on various areas of life such as demography, agriculture, trades, energy consumption, health, taxes and prices. The results obtained from the collected data had been published in their own publication series called Mitteilungen des Statistischen Bureaus des Kantons Bern.