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.
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.
