We commended the efforts of the ASEAN Member States in striving to meet increasing data requirements at the national level, through the development of new indicators and the further strengthening of statistical capacity and cooperation. Recent initiatives included:
i) Brunei Darussalam’s continued efforts to ensure efficiency of statistical processes through the National Statistical Committee focussing on optimising integration between ministries and government departments in the collection, compilation and dissemination of quality, current and timely statistics;
ii) Cambodia’s conduct of cascading forum on the outcomes of the ACSS meetings to Cambodia National Statistical System;
iii) Indonesia’s activities in preparation of the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics to (i) create a more efficient, effective and reliable National Statistical System involving stakeholders at the national and provincial levels, and (ii) meet the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Indonesia;
iv) Lao PDR’s (i) revised statistical law to support increasing data needs for planning and policy making, (ii) newly approved strategy for Sustainable Development of National Statistical System 2016-2025 and Vision 2030, and (iii) enhanced monitoring of the National Socio-Economic Development Plans and SDGs with strong mandate given to the Lao Statistics Bureau;
v) Malaysia’s establishment of a Technical Committee to facilitate the coordination of SDG matters at the national level, and efforts to accelerate the implementation through a) strengthening the institutional mechanisms for SDG implementation; b) conducting studies on data readiness and gap analysis; c) initiating data collection; d) reviewing achievement; and e) monitoring and reporting;
vi) Myanmar’s enforcement of the statistics law and regulations, promotion of userprovider relations and statistics literacy, improvement of statistics cooperation mechanism, implementation of the National Strategy for Development Statistics Action Plan, and development of the National Indicator Framework for Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan;
vii) Philippines’ adoption of the Philippine Statistical Development Programme 2018-2023 which laid out (i) the priority medium term statistical development programmes, (ii) the SDG flow of information from data source to submission for global monitoring, (iii) the development of the initial list of core regional indicators for subnational monitoring and the localisation of the SDGs, and (iv) the various advocacy programmes on statistics;
viii) Singapore’s development of new indicators and more disaggregated statistics for policy studies and analyses, such as (i) proportion of online retail sales which provides useful insights on online retail activity in the digital economy; and (ii) new services components in Singapore’s balance of payments and annual trade in services statistics;
ix) Thailand’s development of its first National Water Information Database to support government decision for water resources development and management planning, and successful conduct of survey on water use, drought and flood area using technology; and
x) Viet Nam’s (i) development of an ASEAN Indicator System to improve data availability, and (ii) finalisation of the Viet Nam SDG indicators as the basis for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the Viet Nam SDGs.