Mr. Vladimir Sokolin – Chairman of the Federal State Statistics Service (ROSSTAT), Russian Federation was on an official mission to NSI on 27 and 28 April 2009.
Within the agenda of the visit he had meetings with Mr. Ljuben Kornezov- Deputy Chairman of Parliament, Mr. Ivan Iskrov- the BNB Governor, Prof. Borislav Borisov - Dean of the University of National and World Economy and advisor to Mr. Georgui Parvanov - President of the Republic of Bulgaria, and also with the Top Management and experts of NSI.
The official mission of Mr. Sokolin was at the invitation of Assoc. Prof. Mariana Kotzeva – BNSI President. During the visit the two Heads of the Statistical Institutions of Bulgaria and Russia continued with the discussions, initiated by Mr. Igor Ulyanov – Deputy Chairman of ROSSTAT in December 2008.
The objective of the mission was to discuss new forms of cooperation between NSI and ROSSTAT. A Protocol of the meeting was signed, updating the Agreement for Cooperation already signed between the institutions in 1999.
The Bulgarian experience in the transition to applying the European standards in statistics is of interest to Russia. The Bulgarian statisticians on their side could avail of the experience of Russian statistics in developing before a year a Personal Inflation Calculator (NSI is to introduce such a calculator in the near months).
The following priority areas of cooperation were outlined:
• Development of statistical infrastructure, incl. economic and social classifications;
• Improvement of business statistics, incl. business registers;
• Conducting regular mirror comparisons of foreign trade data between Bulgaria and Russia.
Mr. Sokolin visited the NSI library and got acquainted with the process of digitalization of the statistical publications.
