Meeting on compilation issues of IMTS 2010

6 – 9 December 2011, Mexico City, Mexico

At its forty-first session (23 - 26 February 2010) the United Nations Statistical Commission adopted International Merchandise Trade Statistics: Concepts and Definitions 2010 (IMTS 2010) and endorsed the implementation programme as contained in the United Nations Secretary General’s report, including the preparation of the revised IMTS Compilers Manual and continued technical assistance activities.

The Global Forum on Trade Statistics in February 2011 jointly organized by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) and the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) in Geneva followed-up on the 2010 Statistical Commission’s decisions and made explicit demands to improve the relevance of international trade statistics by connecting and integrating it with other economic statistics (see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/trade/s_geneva2011/outcome.htm). The Global Forum further urged closer cooperation among the national agencies involved in the compilation and dissemination of international trade statistics to realize those improvements. While countries are starting to adjust their systems to comply with IMTS 2010, it is timely to give direction and emphasis of the data compilation issues for these statistics.

The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) is organizing a meeting on compilation issues of International Merchandise Trade Statistics, Concepts and Definitions, 2010 (IMTS 2010) from 6 to 9 December 2011 in Mexico City in cooperation with and hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI) of Mexico. The purpose of the meeting is to review all draft chapters of the Compilers Manual for IMTS 2010 and to gather country experiences and good practices in the IMTS data compilation.

The meeting will discuss all aspects of quality assurance of merchandise trade statistics; it will discuss data sources, data compilation and data dissemination and will have a presentation on the upgrade of UN Comtrade including the required new data elements.

For further information contact:

Mr. Matthias Reister
Chief, International Merchandise Trade Statistics Section
Statistics Division
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
Tel:    +1 917-367-7098
Email: reister@un.org