“I strongly believe that events such as the meeting today are crucial for improving the production process in statistics and thus, will have a positive impact on the quality of the official statistics along with the increasing user confidence in it.” Assoc. Prof. Atanas Atanasov, PhD, emphasized this during the opening of the 2nd annual meeting of the Working Group on Exchange of Statistical Data and Economic Information (WG ESDEI) at the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) since the BSEC Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs appointed the Republic of Bulgaria as the country-coordinator of the WG. The meeting was held on 13th of December 2022 and it was chaired by Prof. Atanasov.
Ambassador Dimitrious Rallis, Deputy Secretary General of the BSEC PERMIS, in his opening remarks highlighted that the efforts made by Bulgaria as a Country Coordinator for the revival of the Working group as a long period of dormancy were highly appreciated. On behalf of the BSEC Chairmanship-in-Office Mr. Igor Mocanu, Deputy Head of Statistical Coordination Department at the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova also welcomed the participants and talked about the importance of the statistics and its role in the decision-making process.
During the meeting, the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (BNSI) presented the implementation of the Plan of Action of the group in the past two years. BNSI reported that two regular annual meetings took place in this period. In addition, a two days online seminar with more than 50 participants was organized in 2021 on the “Challenges Faced by the Official Statistics during the COVID-19 Pandemic”. Currently Bulgaria is preparing an online publication on that topic with the contributions of the Member States.
The event continued with two very interesting presentations on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goas (SDGs) in the Black See Region. First, Mr. Steven Vale, Senior Statistician and Regional Adviser at the (UNECE), presented the UNECE experience about the “Role of Official Statistics in Monitoring and Evaluation of the Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals in the UNECE Region in the Context of COVID-19 Crisis”. Then, Prof. Dr. Eden Mamut, Secretary General of BSUN, made also a presentation on “The Activities of BSUN for supporting the upgrading process of the BSEC Economic Agenda 2012” that included proposals for collaboration with the Statistical Organizations from the region for developing modeling and simulation tools of the economic processes at local, national and regional scales.
