Mr. Ma Jiantang Met with the President of FSO, Both Sides Gave High Appraisal to the Achievements of Sino-German Statistical Cooperation
At the invitation of Mr. Ma Jiantang, Commissioner of NBS, a German delegation led by Mr. Roderich Egeler, President of Federal Statistical Office of Germany (FSO), visited NBS from 2-3 November. During the meeting, Mr. Ma Jiantang set a high value on the achievements of the Sino-German statistical cooperation.
Mr. Ma Jiantang extended a warm welcome to Mr. Roderich Egeler and the Delegation. Mr. Ma Jiantang pointed out that, on November 4, 1993, NBS and FSO signed the "Cooperation Protocol in Statistics", since then, both sides have cherished this partnership for 16 years, and launched full range of cooperation in different areas, such as in industrial statistics, transportation statistics, collection and collation of international statistical data, statistical legislation, price statistics, cultural and health statistics, remuneration statistics, employment statistics, data dissemination and information service, and so on.
Mr. Ma Jiantang pointed out that, through the mutual visits and discussions by officials and experts, NBS understood and learned from the practices and experiences of German statistical works under the conditions of the market economy, which accelerated the reform and development of China’s statistical works. The achievements of Sino-German statistical cooperation can be summarized as follows: firstly, it promoted the construction of China's statistical laws and regulations, for example, the experiences of German statistical legislation were used for references in the process of amendment of “the Statistics Law of the People’s Republic of China“; secondly, it promoted the adoption of unified statistical indictors, standards and scientific survey methodologies in China’s statistical works, and improved the comparability of statistical data between China and the rest of the world, it also accelerated the adoption of sampling survey and administrative records, and therefore reduced the statistical costs; thirdly, it promoted the modernization construction of China’s statistical technologies, for example, in order to satisfy the needs of government policy-making and other users, computer and network technologies are widely used for better statistical data dissemination.
Mr. Ma Jiantang gave high appraisal to FSO’s assistance helping NBS to improve statistical capacity. He pointed out that, NBS is still facing challenges in three main areas: to further improve China's statistical capacity; to further enhance the quality of data; and to further strengthen the credibility of official statistics. Therefore, NBS needs to draw on the international experiences from Germany and other countries to deal with these challenges.
Mr. Roderich Egeler pointed out that, international cooperation is one of the important works of the FSO, as China is a great political and economic country, it has great significance to developing Sino-German statistical cooperation; hence, China is the first country he visited out of Europe since he was appointed as the President of FSO.
Mr. Egeler reviewed the process of Sino-German statistical cooperation, more than 150 cooperative and exchange activities were carried out by both parties since 1993. they welcomed these activities and gave high appraisal to the achievements of these activities.
Messrs. Egeler and Ma expressed that both parties will do efforts to promote common progress in statistical works of the two countries.
Messrs. Egeler and Ma listened to the reports on implementation of Sino-German Statistical Legal System Project, Employment Statistics Project, Wage Statistics Project, Data Dissemination and Information Services Project, and introduction on Sino-German statistical system.
On November 3, Mr. Xu Xianchun, Deputy Commissioner of NBS, presided over the exchange activities on preparatory work for population censuses in both countries.