United Nations Statistical Commission

The importance of high-quality, readily available national accounts data will continue to grow as the global statistical community moves towards monitoring the implementation of the newly agreed 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Despite good progress in a number of countries, many developing countries are still a long way from actually adjusting their supporting collections of economic statistics with a view to implementing the 2008 SNA with sufficient scope, detail and quality.

To improve the national accounts compilation requires a considerable, concerted and sustained investment in national statistical capacity building based on the technical and institutional aspects of the integrated statistics approach. In this respect the Commission called for a harmonized integrated statistics programme for developing statistical capacity in support of the compilation of internationally comparable macroeconomic accounts.

In response to this call, this lunchtime seminar will explore international and regional coordination mechanisms for a harmonized integrated statistics programme, taking cue from other statistical capacity initiatives such as those on the International Comparison Programme and the Global Strategy to Improve Agriculture and Rural Statistics. Similarly, national and regional development agencies have provided considerable capacity building support in economic statistics, from which valuable lessons can be learned.

The objective of the side event is to identify the shared need for an international conference on statistical capacity building on economic statistics and national accounts and its modalities for establishing a harmonized integrated economic statistics and national accounts programme. In part such conference may focus on overcoming national issues in producing internationally comparable macroeconomic accounts. In this connection, it is particularly important is to secure high level support in the countries for economic statistics and national accounts that is translated in access to administrative source data and the sustained national budgetary funding for generating basic socio-economic statistics for the macroeconomic accounts In addition the conference may focus on the role of regional and international agencies in making available commonly agreed managerial, technical and statistical tools to introduce modern statistical architecture in putting in place a sustained statistical production processes and institutional environment building on ongoing global and regional sectoral programs.

Agenda

Chair:

• Mr. Ivo Havinga, Assistant Director, UNSD
  • Presentation

Speakers:

• Mr. Grant Cameron, Manager, International Statistical Programs, World Bank
  • Presentation
• Mr. Charles Lufumpa, Director, Statistics Department African Development Bank Group
  • Presentation