NEWSLETTER NO.7, NOVEMBER 1994:
To commemorate the ILO's 75th anniversary, this Conference was held in Minsk from 31 August to 2 September 1994. It was organised jointly by the ILO Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, with the State Committee on Statistics, of Belarus. The Chairman was Mr. Carlo Malaguerra, Director-General of the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics. More than 100 participants attended. These consisted of representatives from 24 of the 25 transition countries invited (each country presented a report to the meeting, including Azerbaijan whose representatives could not attend), representatives from other European countries, the UN Statistical Division, the OECD and the Statistics Committee of the CIE.
Two of the main objectives of the Conference were to take stock of progress made in the development of labour statistics in transition countries since the November 1990 Moscow Workshop on Economic Statistics in Population and Housing Censuses and Surveys; and to examine the desired direction and modalities for future international cooperation and support in this field. Five main topics were discussed: economically active population, employment and unemployment statistics; minimum wages, wages, labour cost and consumer price index, development and use of major international economical classification in national practices, and labour market policies (formulation and implementation).
An important conclusion of the Conference was that many transition countries have made remarkable progress in conducting labour force surveys. Also, by the end of the Conference it had become obvious that one area which was of concern to virtually all countries present was the development of guidelines on methodologies for reconciling and combining data from different sources, such as the combined use of labour force survey results and the balance sheets of labour resources based on enterprises reporting data from administrative records.
The ILO Bureau of Statistics first gave technical assistance to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics (PBS) in December 1993 at a Workshop on Statistics, which took place in Jerusalem. This workshop, in English and Arabic, discussed definitions of unemployment, underemployment, wages and standard of living, and other problems linked to the actual setting up of the PBS.
The PBS was established in October 1993, to become the nucleus of a central bureau of statistics for the emerging Palestinian self-governing authority. The framework for conducting these activities is set forth in a General Statistical Law and a Master Plan for Palestinian official statistics, both submitted to the Palestinian National Authority for approval.
To help the development of labour statistics and to supplement the master plan, two technical assistance missions were undertaken by the ILO Bureau of Statistics in 1994, which resulted in a draft labour statistics programme recommending :(a) the establishment of a labour statistics unit within the Population and Social Statistics Division of the future Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics; (b) the creation of a Committee on Labour Statistics, possibly as a subsidiary body of the Advisory Council of Statistics to coordinate the production and use of labour statistics in all concerned government agencies; (c) launching of a semi-annual labour force survey, starting in 1995, with supplementary modules on different areas of social concern after the first year of operation; (d) the development of a quarterly establishment survey on average earnings and hours of work in different branches of economic activity, as a first step towards a full system of wages statistics; (e) the review of options for developing a standard classification of occupations for statistical purposes, as well as for meeting other administrative needs; and (f) examining the feasibility of developing targetted statistics on employment in the informal sector, using the forthcoming population and housing census (planned for 1997) as a vehicle for constructing a suitable area frame.