ZAGREB, May 4 (Hina) - Accession talks between Croatia and the European Union will start soon and reliable, objective, correct, comparable and transparent statistical figures will be crucial both for the negotiations and
decision-making processes in Croatia as well as for the EU's political decisions, the European Commission Delegation's chief, Jacques Wunenburger, said in Zagreb on Tuesday.
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ZAGREB, May 4 (Hina) - Accession talks between Croatia and the European
Union will start soon and reliable, objective, correct, comparable and
transparent statistical figures will be crucial both for the
negotiations and decision-making processes in Croatia as well as for
the EU's political decisions, the European Commission Delegation's
chief, Jacques Wunenburger, said in Zagreb on Tuesday.#L#
In his keynote speech at the international conference 'The Development
of Official Statistics: Role in Market Economy and Transition
Process,' Wunenburger said that the harmonisation of the Croatian
official statistics with EU and world standards would facilitate the
monitoring of the process of Croatia's association with the Union.
He added that cooperation of Croatia's statistics offices with
countries which entered the EU on May 1 and 15 EU member-states had
been encouraged by the Croatia-EU Stabilisation and Association
Agreement and financially supported by funds from the CARDS
programme.
Some five million euros from CARDS was invested into regulating the
Croatian official statistics at the national and regional levels in
2001.
The adoption of any political decision in the process of negotiations,
particularly when Croatia joins the EU, will not be possible if
decisions cannot be based on comparable figures pertaining to all
aspects of the state - from the economy, culture, population to
environmental protection, Swedish Ambassador to Zagreb Sture Theolin
told the conference.
The development of official statistics is necessary for the
harmonisation of the current statistics with standards of the EUROSTAT
(Statistical Office of the European Communities) and the European
Central Bank (ECB) , said the executive director of the Croatian
National Bank's research and statistics department and chairman of the
Statistics Committee, Ljubinko Jankov.
He announced that Croatia should now introduce statistical estimates
in the segments of society which had not yet been covered by
statistics.
Tuesday's conference was organised as part of cooperation projects
between the Croatian Central Office of Statistics and the Statistics
Sweden (SCB), financed by the Swedish International Development Agency
(SIDA).
The event pooled statisticians from Croatia, Sweden, Albania,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro.
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