Context
With a view to measuring wealth creation and the dynamics of international trade relations, governments, institutions, businesses, and analysts are expressing a growing need for relevant, detailed, and comparable statistics on trade in services.
Quantifying trade in services—fundamentally more difficult than measuring trade in goods—depends on information that can be provided by companies’ accounting and record management systems or by individuals, as well as on various data sources, including administrative sources, surveys, and estimation techniques.
The UEMOA Commission has had a successful collaboration experience with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which made it possible to establish a harmonized methodological and regulatory framework aligned with
international norms and standards for the collection, processing, and dissemination of Statistics on International Trade in Services (SITS). This collaboration also led to the development and updates of a software application, TiSSTAT, to automate the entire survey process. To date, UEMOA Member States have conducted several rounds of ongoing SITS surveys. However, they do not yet have experience using TiSSTAT.
In order to better prepare the delivery of technical assistance, the UEMOA Commission and UNCTAD held videoconference meetings with national teams. It is important to note that the three countries—Mali, Niger, and Togo—are preparing to integrate TiSSTAT for the first time into their systems for collecting and processing data
on international trade in services.
As part of this technical assistance, and to ensure that national experts can effectively take ownership of this tool, support is required during the data collection phase. It will initially focus on introducing experts to the application environment, sample management, configuration of official letters, questionnaire management, monitoring of data collection or data entry, etc.
The implementation of this technical assistance will enable UNCTAD and the UEMOA Commission to ensure that the three NSIs achieve optimal mastery of all TiSSTAT functionalities for managing the sampling framework and monitoring data collection.
Objectives
The main objective of this technical assistance is to improve data collection on international trade in services by implementing the functionalities of TiSSTAT.
More specifically, this technical assistance aims to:
- Ensure optimal deployment of TiSSTAT;
- Ensure proper configuration of TiSSTAT;
- Guarantee secure access to TiSSTAT for all stakeholders;
- Test the proper functioning of all features, particularly those related to data collection;
- Ensure alignment of national data collection questionnaires with those developed in TiSSTAT;
- Manage the sampling framework and draw a stratified sample within TiSSTAT;
- Conduct a pilot survey on a limited sample using TiSSTAT.
