Held on 11- 20 October 2023, the 21st International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) featured two sessions on statistics of cooperatives and statistics of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) on 16 October.
During one of the sessions, participants heard from David Hunter, a statistician and an ex-ILO official, who said that a pilot test had shown the Guidelines concerning statistics of cooperatives adopted by the 20th ICLS are relevant for different country contexts and approaches.
ILO member states, including Korea, Brazil, Uruguay and South Africa, also indicated their overall support for the work of the Office on statistics of cooperatives and shared their recommendations, including further engagement with national statistics offices.
The ICA participated as an observer and was represented by its Director of Research, Hyungsik Eum, who highlighted the relevance of the work on statistics of the SSE for his organisation.
“We want to have well-tuned and elaborated statistics to show our weight and contributions to the economy and society. In this regard, we cannot emphasise enough the importance of the Guidelines on Cooperative Statistics, and we fully support their further development.
“We hope the ICLS supports further development of the statistics on cooperatives in the coming periods and also hope more national statistical offices use and implement the international standards developed within the framework of international standards, including the Guidelines. As shown by this pilot test, we sincerely believe that developing national statistics would need to be a co-construction process in collaboration with different stakeholders, including the cooperative movement,” he said.
Attendees also heard from Prof Marie Bouchard, Professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), who presented the Roadmap towards guidelines concerning statistics of the SSE and called for operationalising the definition of the SSE in statistics.
Simel Esim, Head of ILO’s Cooperatives Unit and Co-Chair of the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE) said the technical working group on statistics of the SSE would be brought under the auspices of the UNTFSSE.
The global cooperative movement welcomed the adoption of the ILC resolution on the SSE in 2022 and the UN resolution on the SSE in April 2023. The ICA will continue to collaborate with the ILO and other UN agencies to support the development of the SSE statistics.
Further information:
Statistics on cooperatives
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Presentation
Statistics on the SSE
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