The price statistics team at ESCWA has been working towards enhancing member states’ capacities through the development of various innovative initiatives. In its latest initiative, ESCWA’s Statistics Division developed a training course for capacity building on price statistics, focusing on the ICP, purchasing power parities (PPPs) and their various uses especially in SDG monitoring in addition to the integration between ICP and CPI.
The training targeted 13 national price statisticians with no prior knowledge or experience in the ICP and focused on:
- ICP data requirements and surveys namely the household consumption main survey, private education and rentals, government compensation survey, and gross fixed capital formation which combines construction and machinery and equipment surveys.
- The different approaches to rentals and the productivity adjustment for government compensation services.
- The price validation process and the different types and levels of validation.
- National Accounts framework and classification, National Accounts data compilation, the Model Report on Expenditure Statistics and expenditure data validation methodology.
- The PPP computation methodology at the elementary aggregate level and aggregation to the higher levels.
- The integration between CPI and ICP, including the presentation of the innovative integration initiatives undertaken both at the regional and national levels.
A number of exercises were developed for practical problem-solving sessions to increase understanding of the training concepts. The course also devoted hands-on training sessions on the use of the special ICP toolkit, including the data entry and validation modules, followed by applications using training data.
At the end of the training, participants were provided with completion certificates. Some country representatives requested a special national training course to be delivered at their national statistical offices.
Amman, Jordan
