Working Group of Statistical
Experts, 11th Session
Bangkok, 23-26 November
1999
International Standard
Classifications: Developments and Status of Implementation
Document STAT/WGSE.11/15
presents the report of the United Nations
Workshop on Classifications, held at Canberra
from 27 September to 1 October 1999. The participating
countries were mostly from Asia and the Pacific,
and this short addendum attempts to draw out
some of the conclusions and recommendations
which relate particularly to this region,
for the attention of the Working Group.
The Canberra Workshop
expressed the need for a more regional approach
to the development and adaptation of classifications.
At the meeting, many countries reported on
the well-established practice of introducing
additional detail into international standards,
such as ISIC or CPC, to accommodate their
national economic (or social) situation. At
the moment there is no guidance on such disaggregation;
countries raise subdivisions with sui generis
definitions and numbering systems. The Workshop
felt that there may be sufficient common ground
among countries with similar economic structures
to justify coordinated adaptation work; that
would have the advantage of improving data
comparability at a lower level of detail,
as well as of providing a template for countries
considering a detailing of the international
standard. In the secretariat's view, the idea
holds more appeal at the level of subregions
or small groups of countries, given the heterogeneity
of situations in the ESCAP region as a whole.
Facilitating and coordinating
this type of regional or subregional adaptation
to international standard classifications
would be, according to the thinking expressed
at the Workshop, an important part of the
role that ESCAP could in future play in the
field of classifications. Information exchange
and an advisory role were also mentioned in
this context. The secretariat could in principle
take on such a role if work on classifications
is accorded sufficiently high priority in
its programme of activities. A number of points
need to be made in this connection, however.
Classification work tends to be time-consuming
and, with regard to individual classifications,
of a quite specialized nature. Currently,
for example, the Statistics Division has practically
no up-to-date specialized expertise in classifications,
so this would have to be acquired from external
sources or built up among existing staff,
or perhaps work would need to be 'outsourced'
to experts at the national level. It is suspected
that subregional organizations within the
Asia-Pacific region may be faced with resource
scenarios that are not dissimilar. An appropriate
balance would need to be struck between what
can effectively be done at the regional and/or
subregional level, and what should be better
handled at United Nations Headquarters (where
there are five full-time Professionals in
the Standard Classifications Section) or the
headquarters of other supranational organizations.
A specific role for
ESCAP may emerge in areas which are of special
interest to developing countries, those in
the region in particular. Examples cited at
the Canberra workshop were possible sub-classifications
in the informal sector, in conjunction with
the Delhi Group, and classifications of time
use, where the situation varies markedly from
that in developed countries where most work
has been done to date. In this regard the
secretariat is already engaged in bringing
together the experiences of those developing
countries in the region which have done some
pioneering work in this area; as described
in document STAT/WGSE.11/10, a seminar on
time-use surveys in which classifications
will figure prominently will be held very
shortly in Ahmedabad.
More generally, the
Committee on Statistics has already determined
that it should be the channel through which
the regional view (or views) on statistical
issues are conveyed to global statistical
bodies such as the United Nations Statistical
Commission. Presumably this applies also to
classification matters, in which developing
countries have traditionally been involved
only marginally. The Canberra workshop recognized
that feedback (and no doubt something more
proactive than that term implies) was extremely
important for future work on international
standards in classifications. The ESCAP region
certainly has the potential to contribute
in a wide variety of fields, including the
design of alternative groupings of economic
activities. The tourism industry, for example,
is important in a very large number of countries
in the region, yet is difficult to assemble
data on through current mainstream classifications.
At the Workshop, all ESCAP countries represented
expressed the need to reflect the information
and communications sector in ISIC. At the
other end of the economic activity spectrum,
agriculture and fisheries continue to account
for sizeable proportions of GDP in many countries
of the region, both in Asia and the Pacific,
and still larger shares of employment; classifications
in these primary areas have remained relatively
static over several decades, and the case
for more detailed breakdowns could be strong
The Workshop also stressed
the need for training on various aspects of
classifications. It is evident that SIAP,
as the pre-eminent statistical training institution
in the region, should play a major role in
any such training, in collaboration in many
cases with either UNSD or the custodians of
other classifications. In this connection
it is interesting to note that in a recent
survey of training needs conducted by SIAP,
hardly any countries cited classifications
as an area where training was needed. This
may well be due in part to the fact that in
many national statistical offices in the region,
classifications are not handled in a separate
institutional unit; staff working exclusively
on classifications (if indeed there are any)
are often attached to the respective subject-matter
area. A situation commonly described at the
Canberra workshop was that attention was only
focused on classifications in the course of
preparations for a major statistical exercise
such as a population or economic census.
The Working Group may
wish to comment on the issues raised at the
Workshop, and provide suitable guidance on
future classifications work of the secretariat.
