Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
26
Table 13 summarizes the percentage of official data in FAOSTAT production cells in COMCEC,
APCAS and Asian countries. COMCEC Members in APCAS are slightly better than APCAS
Members, who are better than Asia and Oceania, in providing official data. The best performer
is Bangladesh and the worst is Iran.
Table 13: Percentage of Official Data in FAOSTAT Production Cells in Asia (2010)
Country Percentage
Afghanistan 53
Bangladesh 77
Indonesia 65
Iran 31
Malaysia 41
Pakistan 75
COMCEC (6) 57
APCAS (25) 55
Asia (50) 41
Oceania (20) 10
Source: FAO, 2012.
The second pillar of the Global Strategy is the integration of the agricultural statistical system
into the national statistical system. The benefits from this integration are dependent on the
quality of the national statistical system. The next section takes a look at an indicator which
evaluates the overall capacity of the national statistical systems in 140 developing countries.
The Statistical Capacity Indicator (SCI) featured in the World Bank’s Bulletin Board on
Statistical Capacity (BBSC) has three dimensions: statistical methodology; source data; and
periodicity and timeliness. The first dimension, statistical methodology, measures a country’s
ability to adhere to internationally recommended standards and methods. This aspect is
captured by assessing guidelines and procedures used to compile macroeconomic statistics,
and social data reporting and estimation practices. The second dimension, source data, reflects
whether a country conducts data collection activities in line with internationally recommended
periodicity, and whether data from administrative systems is available and reliable for
statistical estimation purposes. The third dimension, periodicity and timeliness, looks at the
availability and periodicity of key socioeconomic indicators, of which nine are Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) indicators. This dimension attempts to measure the extent to
which data are made accessible to users through the transformation of source data into timely
statistical outputs.
Countries are scored using input provided by countries and/or publicly available information.
A composite score for each assessment area and an overall score combining all three areas are
derived for each country on a scale of 0-100. A score of 100 indicates that the country meets all
the criteria.16
16 World Bank, 2014a.