The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its partners will work together to compile statistics for the period up until 2015 at a meeting which opened in Hanoi on December 8.

The two-day meeting has drawn the heads of statistical offices from eight of the groups 10 members (excluding Brunei and Myanmar) plus the United Nations, the EU, Japan, the Republic of Korea and China.

It is the first follow-up to an ASEAN Summit joint statement that recognised the framework of cooperation as an important legal foundation for regional efforts to establish an ASEAN community statistical system by 2015.

The Acting General Director of Vietnam General Statistics Office, Do Thuc, said the 11 th ASEAN Heads of Statistical Offices Meeting (AHSOM 11) would review the progress made in 2010 and difficulties and challenges during the next five years as well as developing statistics agencies across the bloc.

Also high on the meeting’s agenda are measures to improve the capacity of the ASEAN Statistics committee (ASEAN stats) to make it an important link between the statistics agencies of each member as well as between the group and outsiders, including international organisations.

Plans to build mechanisms and commitments to implement sharing and providing statistics within the grouping and priorities of cooperation will also be discussed.

The head of ASEAN’s Press Office, Dr. Aladdin D. Rillo pointed out the important role played by statistics in socio-economic reforms. Rillo called for further improvement in regional statistics to overcome the limitations and challenges when processing statistics data by each member and the group as a whole.

ASEAN’s Secretariat pledged to provide more technical assistance to statistics offices in member nations to meet ASEAN’s goals.

Statistics have been put under the supervision of the ASEAN secretariat./.