/ EUROPEAN COMMISSION
EUROSTAT
Directorate E: Agriculture and Environment Statistics; Statistical Cooperation
Unit E-4: Statistical Cooperation with European and Mediterranean countries /

Doc. MGSC/2008/13

Tenth meeting of the

Management Group on Statistical Cooperation

24 - 25 April 2008

Luxembourg, BechBuilding

Room Ampere

Start: 10h00 am

Cards 2003 regional programme - lessons learnt and suggestions for the future - Serbia

Point 3.3 of the Agenda

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During the last period SORS had the opportunity to be involved in differentprojects:

-CARDS National project (mostly National Accounts)

-CARDS 2003 Regional project

-Sida National project (SBR, SBS, STS, energy statistics and balances, agriculture statistics, IT etc)

-Sida Regional project (environment, gender statistics, statistical methodology)

-WB project (poverty monitoring and analyses)

The first most important thing having in mind this list was the need for good coordination and the second most important was to avoid overlapping of the projects, activities, ideas.

CARDS 2003 Regional Project

Within this project SORS had a very good experience with:

  1. Working Group meetings – Mostly held in Luxembourg

That was very good opportunity and possibility to:

a)get information what we should work on in the next period

b)see our position in comparison to other countries

  1. Other meetings –joint UNECE, OECD and Eurostat meetings

Participation at these meetings helped us in the same direction as the WGM, especially in the fact that we were not able to finance most of them on our own.

  1. Trainings and seminars in specific areas, very well prepared and defined in advance,were of the great help. That specially covered:

a) Foreign Trade statistics

b) PPP (Purchasing Power parities)

c) Migration statistics and

d) Labour market statistics

  1. One week trainings (10-12 of them) in various statistical areas covering general statistics, statistical methodology, methods, IT and techniques gathered a significant number of employees
  1. We had the possibility to send three younger colleagues to Luxembourg on a six months training which was very important not only for them but very useful for the Office
  1. Expert missions were also available – example was National Accounts and visit of Slovenian expert that happened two months ago.

Main characteristics of the Cards 2003 regional project and conclusions of SORS:

  1. Flexibility of Cards regional comparing to the CARDS National Project (in activities, budget, choice of experts)
  2. Variety of areas covered
  3. Faster process of planning and faster realisation
  4. Understanding from the Implementation agency and Eurostat
  5. Possibility to include some activities which were not foreseen in advance

Recommendations from SORS for future projects implementation:

  1. To keep the flexibility
  2. To foster NSI to take more technical assistance (on specific issues)
  3. To include other counterparts and producers of official statistics that gives result in better communication and better quality statistics produced.

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