Croatia Could Meet Chapter 18 Criteria in Spring

Croatia has made good progress in aligning its statistical system with European standards and has a good chance of receiving a positive assessment from Eurostat in March regarding compliance with EU statistical criteria, said Eurostat Director General Walter Radermacher at today’s conference ‘Development of Official Statistics: Code of Practice for European Statistics’ organized by Eurostat and the Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS).

Negotiations in Chapter 18, which deals with statistics, were opened in June last year, with two benchmarks established for their closure – alignment of agricultural statistics and national accounts. Walter Radermacher assessed the cooperation with the DZS as very good, and while noting that negotiations could be concluded in March 2009, he called for further strengthening of the Bureau’s staff, particularly with experts in information technology. As he stated, national institutes are the foundation of Eurostat’s work, as the EU’s central statistical office shapes its data from information obtained from member states.

Chief negotiator for Croatia’s EU accession Vladimir Drobnjak assessed that statistics is one of the most important areas in the negotiations, which has a specific chapter, but, as he noted, it also appears in almost all other chapters. Drobnjak stated that he is confident that Croatia will meet both EU benchmarks by March 2009. DZS Director Ivan Kovač reported that the implementation activities to meet the EU benchmarks are in the final phase. He also mentioned that the restructuring process of the DZS aimed at achieving sufficient administrative capacity for the balanced operation of all its segments is also in the final phase. According to him, conditions are being created in the Bureau for the introduction of a range of new statistical products, and efforts are being made to improve data sources and introduce new technologies for their collection and delivery to users. (H)