Introduction

At the Ninth Ministerial Conference, held in Bali, Indonesia, from 3 to 7 December 2013, ministers adopted the “Bali Package”, a series of decisions aimed at streamlining trade, allowing developing countries more options for providing food security, boosting least-developed countries’ trade and helping development more generally. It will reduce the cost of trading, smooth the flow of goods across borders and provide more certainty for business. Least developed countries will also benefit from increased access to markets for goods and services in developed countries. At the same time, EU-US trade and investment negotiations have made steady progress in the last eight months.

Within this context, high quality and timely official statistics on international trade and tourism remain extremely important. As a collaborative effort, the international organizations (Eurostat, IMF, OECD, WTO, UNWTO, and UNSD) present their views and outline their efforts to strengthen the capacity of the national statistical systems, especially in the developing countries. The just completed draft Compilers guides for statistics of international trade in services and for tourism statistics will be briefly introduced, and explanation will be given on the outstanding work on compilation guidance. Reference will also be made to the Compilation Guide for BPM6 and the Compilers manual for IMTS 2010.

Moreover, the agencies will report on recent and upcoming technical cooperation and capacity-building programs, such as Eurostat’s MEDSTAT seminars; WTO’s efforts on trade in services; UNWTO’s capacity building programme for Tourism statistics; IMF’s technical assistance programmes and UNSD’s capacity-building seminars on trade and tourism statistics. In many cases, the international agencies as well as experts from advanced statistical offices join forces in the capacity development activities.

This session is meant to reply to your questions and comments on capacity building in the area of trade and tourism statistics.