Palestine: The development of a statistical business register

The project focuses on the following topics:

Technical assistance for the assessment of the current situation, review of the matching mechanisms of previous censuses, analyisis of strengths and weaknesses
Technical assistance to assess the updating strategy of the SBR through the administrative records and get acquainted with the available information
Technical assistance to develop a digitalized matching system and to improve current operational activities
Technical assistance to develop tools to deal with the informal sector not registered in the Administrative Business Register

Objectives

Overall objective. The project has been approved by AICS as part of the initiative “Enhancing the business environment for the micro, small and medium Palestinian enterprises”, which aims at enhancing Palestinian economic competiveness by both creating a more conductive business environment and putting in place a series of mechanisms to facilitate the access of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to renewable energies, in order to reduce their production costs and improve their productivity.

The project will consist in technical support to PCBS for building up the Statistical Business Register which will contribute to improve the range and quality of economic statistics available to the MOFP, as well as the MONE, the chambers of commerce, the municipalities and fiscal offices to better monitor the private sector.

Specific objective. Taking the current situation as starting point, PCBS and Istat will cooperate in the following areas of intervention:

Setting-up a methodology for composing the information collected through surveys as well as administrative data which are prepared, validated and made available for the production of statistics
Creating mechanisms for unifying efforts with relevant partners to develop and update the SBR
Building and structuring details of the Unique Identification Number (UID)
Integrating and linking administrative data with statistical data to develop and update the SBR
Creating mechanisms for developing the rest of required elements to build and update the business register (variables, data exchange with partners, data quality, computing, etc.)

Partner

The direct beneficiary is PCBS. Indirect beneficiaries will be key institutional data producers and users, in particular the MOFP, the MONE, the chambers of commerce, the municipalities and fiscal.

In a wider perspective, the whole country will benefit from the project, as government policies based on reliable statistical data allow to better guide and evaluate the social and economic development of the country.