Ashgabat, 17 September 2019: The joint project between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the State Statistics Committee of Turkmenistan (Turkmenstat) conducted a series of trainings across the five regions of the country to prepare the interviewers to conduct survey on production of goods and provision of services by households for exhaustive estimation of the GDP.

International and national experts covered a broad range of topics including establishing of the communication channels and improving communication skills with the interviewees, defining the household, filling in the applications for assessment, monitoring the impact of the implemented activities and analysis of the collected data. During each training, participants were offered hands-on experience of conducting an interview with representatives of different households.

“The assessment is conducted anonymously and allows to evaluate the input of the household economic activity into the overall economic growth of the country. It is important for every country, especially Turkmenistan, since local people pay a lot of attention and spend a lot of time canning, producing their own embroidery, baking and repairing something on their own. Meanwhile, we are not assessing the monetary value and do not calculate the income but consider the economic impact of such actions. All of these activities have economic value and must be reflected in the GDP,” explains invited expert Svetlana Silayeva.

The invited experts have updated the methodology for calculation of the non-observed economy and methodology for random selection of the households to conduct a survey on production of goods and provision of services and presented a designed questionnaire to be used. Upon completion of the training, Turkmenstat adopted the application and conducted a pilot survey. Now, Turkmenstat has randomly selected 2000 households and conducts survey.

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The joint project between UNDP and Turkmenstat seeks to improve the capacity of the data collection and analysis for comprehensive assessment and evaluation of the implementation of the sustainable development agenda of Turkmenistan and supports the transitioning of Turkmenstat to SNS2008.

The visit of expert is organized with support of the “Experts on Demand” program funded by the government of the Russian Federation.