MANAMA: The GCC countries have embarked on a major initiative of harmonizing national statistics in more transparent and professional way with first such report likely to be out by 2017, a senior official at the GCC-Stat, revealed.
“We are working on foreign investment survey across the region as the compilation of the statistics is very important step towards putting together region-wide statistics document,” Dr Ahmed Al Farid, Director of Economic Statists at GCC-Stat on the sidelines of the 1st meeting of GCC Task Force told The24X7News Bahrain (www.twentyfoursevennews.com).
GCC-Stat is an Oman based organization hosting the special GCC task force on foreign direct investments and responsible for harmonizing other statistical data or national indicators and also provides capacity building to the entire GCC member states including the training.
Dr Al Farid said that apart from providing training and technical assistance the GCC-STAT also creates data base on foreign investments which also include facts and figures of GCC intra-trade, both recording the inflow and outflow of investments.
In this regard GCC-wide, he said, we have 10-point strategy which primarily covers national accounts, FDI’s, trade, short term indicators, population and labour statistics etc.
“We have a roadmap to address the issues like legal framework, evaluation, vision, mission, objectives and action plan which takes us to the implementation of the action plan,” he explained.
The Bahrain-based the MENA Centre for Investment in cooperation with GCC-Stat, Oman and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is hosting a two-day a special task force meeting on foreign direct investment statistics in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
The meeting was attended by representatives of central banks, statistical and financial entities of five GCC Countries and also the GCC Secretariat. The task force meeting will look into harmonizing statistical efforts between all GCC Countries under the umbrella of GCC-Stat with the help of UNCTAD. This is the first official meeting of this program. This initiative will look into creating a work plan and road map strategy for coordinating GCC Direct and Portfolio investment for 2015 to 2020. The main areas of interest are identification of statistical initiatives and projects of common interest and possible avenues of cooperation. This program will result in the creation of national country teams that will help to implement the program in their respective countries.
The experts from UNCTAD were Dr. Masataka Fujita, Head of Investment Trends & Issues Branch and Dr. Astrit Sulstarova, Chief of Trends & Data Section in the Investment Trends & Issues Branch. The representative from GCC-Stat was Dr. Ahmed Al Farid, Director of Economic Statistics and from the General Secretariat for Development and Planning in the State of Qatar, Ms. Wadha Al-Jabor, Statistical Researcher.