The Neighbourhood Policy of the European Union in Tunisia, is being consolidated day by day over more sectors. The last one concerns Statistics. Even though co-operation between Tunisia and its European partner in this chapter goes back to several years, it is getting stronger, and the day of November 11th is a proof. This date was the opportunity to reinforce the Support Programme for the implementation of the Association Agreement with the European Union (P3A), through the allocation of a 30 million euro budget for twinning and partnership actions in the area of statistics about which Odoardo Como, Prime Secretary of the European Delegation in Tunisia, says « that it is an area that will help to meet auto-knowledge needs, access to information and promoting the elaboration of statistical data in different regions in Tunisia ».
A 9 month programme to better highlight statistical information
This programme planned to start on April 1st 2009 and end on December 31st of the same year, will deal with twinning between the National Institute for Statistics (NIS) and the Italian Centre ofor Studies and Training « Formez » in consortium with Istat, Isae and Csi Piemonte. This twinning is within the framework of the programme (P3A), it aims at supporting the efforts of the Tunisian public administration and institutions in the implementation of the conditions for the Association Agreement in all the areas, mainly economic, but also commercial and of services so as to facilitate their adaptation to the new liberalisation conditions of the Tunisian market and competition with other markets. The programme will have three initial objectives: reinforcement of statistical information relating to entrprises, development of the economic information system and contribution to improving the National Statistics System. Indeed, the programme will try to fill the gap at the level of statistical information on the productive tissue, which remains a crucial element in the definition and implementation of Tunisian Development Strategy. The elaboration of a national plan for statistics with the five-year development plan will help to ensure the integration of the global development actions in the country.
Modern tools with the enterprise at the heart of the project
The reinforcement of statistical information relating to enterprises is an important component of the development programme of the whole statistics system, it presents an essential support to decision-making for political leaders as well as public and private economic actors. The development of a Statistics Information System within the NIS is within the Tunisian-European co-operation, with the “Association Agreement”. This twinning programme is, indeed, a concrete way of implementing the said agreement. It will include three main chapters. The first chapter entitled « Architecture of SSIE (System of Statistical Information on Enterprises», will try during the three phases to elaborate an evaluation study of the institutional framwork of this type of statistics on the enterprises, in addition to the exploitation of the administration files containing statistical data on the enterprises and finally elaborate an organisational model for the NSI in the area of enterprise statistics. The second chapter of the programme gives details about the basic instruments of the SSIE , i twill aim at reinforcing the basic instruments and capacities of the NIS in general in order to coordinate the information on the enterprises. The third chapter of the project, that is « sources of the statistical products » will lead to the realisation of surveys and the development of integrating information on the enterprises. This will involve the elaboration of surveys on enterprises as well as reviewing the structural surveys so as to improve and develop industrial statistics. A survey on sectoral structure on foreign trade will be elaborated within this chapter as well as an effort to reinforce the activity of quality control of statistics data. The project will try to implement a platform for informatics activities.
