Experts meet to discuss guidelines for statistics on cooperatives

On 4 April 2018, the COPAC Technical Working Group (TWG) on Cooperative Statistics held its second in-person meeting at the headquarters of the International Labour Organization (ILO), in order to discuss draft guidelines for statistics on cooperatives.

With the inputs of the TWG meeting participants, the guidelines will be finalised and proposed at the 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in October 2018 in a landmark initiative to improve the quality of statistics on cooperatives around the world. This work will be crucial to better measure the impact of the cooperative movement on its members, workers and the economy as a whole, and to track the contributions of cooperatives to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The TWG was created by COPAC in 2016 to unite key stakeholders (namely national statistics offices, the cooperative movement, COPAC members, UN agencies, government and researchers) in an effort to improve the quality, accessibility and comparability of statistics on cooperatives around the world. During its first in-person meeting in 2017, the TWG discussed the Conceptual Framework on Measurement of Cooperatives and its Operationalization, which proved the foundation for the concepts in the draft guidelines.

Through the leadership of COPAC and the ILO’s Department of Statistics and Cooperatives Unit within its Enterprises Department, the TWG has helped take action on the resolution concerning further work on statistics on cooperatives that was adopted at the 19th ICLS in 2013. COPAC has the honor to collaborate with Marie J. Bouchard, TWG Chair and President of International Scientific Commission on ‘Social & Cooperative Economy’ for CIRIEC International, who has not only led the TWG work, but also the drafting of the Conceptual Framework and the draft guidelines.

In addition to the draft guidelines and Conceptual Framework, the ILO led the following projects with the support and expertise of TWG members: a global mapping providing an analysis based on a database of how statistics on cooperatives were produced in more than 70 countries around the world; case studies on statistics on cooperatives in eleven countries (Spain, Italy, France, Republic of Korea, Costa Rica, Russian Federation, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, the UK and the Philippines); and three reports serving as background for the development of the guidelines (on employment, classification and economic value added of cooperatives).

To learn more about this pioneering work on cooperative statistics, please refer to following resources:

For more information about COPAC’s work on cooperative statistics, please contact Fran McCrae, COPAC Coordinator, at copac[at]copac[dot]coop.