Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
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Category A Countries (126 and more): Countries which have relatively well-developed
agricultural statistics systems, i.e. in the top 25 percent. There are 9 countries in this group:
Turkey, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Mozambique, Togo, Cameroon, Iran, Egypt and Bangladesh.
Category B Countries (115-125): Countries with better than average agricultural statistics
systems, i.e. between 25-50 percent. There are 9 countries in this group: Niger, Albania,
Tunisia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Jordan, Mali and Tajikistan.
Category C Countries (92-114): Countries with below average agricultural statistics systems,
i.e. lower than 50 percent, but better than the lowest 25 percent. There are 9 countries in this
group: Uganda, Benin, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Guinea-Bissau, Palestine, Mauritania, Malaysia
and Lebanon.
Category D Countries (91 and less): Countries with relatively inefficient agricultural statistics
systems, i.e. ranking in the bottom 25 percent. There are 9 countries in this group: Qatar,
Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Senegal, Kuwait, Sudan and Côte
d’Ivoire.
Of course it may not be possible to have concise cut-off points, since some assessments already
come with particular groupings and may have used different criteria. Others contain some
members of the COMCEC sample, which is good since these countries can be used as the
bridging countries to link the various indexes. The bad news is that the relative positions of the
same country in two different assessments can differ significantly.
Table 37 puts together IASD based country groupings and the agricultural statistics capacity
assessments by FAO Regional Offices, AfDB and the World Bank’s statistical capacity
assessment, made according to the country groupings as presented earlier in Table 16. The
country groupings are presented in diverse shades of purple (whereby a darker shade
indicates a better score) for easier visualization.
The first column added to the left of the earlier table is the IASD country groupings either
based on the SSAQ as presented above, or to be estimated from the information in the columns
to the right. The countries whose colored boxes contain numbers (IASD scores) are those for
which IASDs are computed based on the SSAQ. The countries with colored boxes, containing
alphabetical rather than numberical values, are the COMCEC Member Countries for which IASD
scores are missing. In these instances, their categories were estimated. The six countries which
are coloured yellow are those for which there were no previous assessments found.
Fortunately for four of these IASD results were computed, which left only two to estimate from
the information not contained in Table 37.
When looking at the IASD categories and those from other studies to match the countries, it
can be observed that they are very consistent. In other words, this study’s A and B category
countries are also A or B category countries in other studies. Similarly, the C and D category
countries also match with other studies. This confidently supports this study’s ability in
assigning categories to the IASD missing COMCEC Members in this list. Based on this, the
missing categories in the left column were assigned with those from the category averages on
the right.