HCMC – Statistics Denmark yesterday, November 26, signed an agreement with the General Statistics Office of Vietnam (GSO) to help the latter provide adequate and trustworthy official statistics based on international standards.
The agreement marks the commencement of a 30-month cooperation project of the two countries on official statistics with a focus on the use of administrative data for producing population, migration and education statistics. It also involves exploring the opportunities in big data for producing statistics as well as producing the first-ever environmental-economic accounts for Vietnam. Denmark will spend 6.5 million DKK (some US$1 million) on the project.
At the signing ceremony, Danish Ambassador to Vietnam Kim Højlund Christensen said population and migration dynamics were crucial for any society. In Vietnam, the statistics available on these issues were fraught with insufficient data.
The agreement will help Vietnam improve the quality of its national statistics. Accordingly, Statistics Denmark will work closely with GSO and other relevant Vietnamese ministries to exchange and share Danish experiences and knowledge in the sector.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Nguyen Thi Huong, director general of GSO, said using administrative data and big data was a trend widely used by national statistics systems in the world to make complete and effective use of data resources collected from ministries, agencies and other data owners. This is to ensure the timely provision of disaggregated, good quality data for governments, enterprises and other data users.
GSO will closely collaborate with relevant ministries and agencies in Vietnam and Statistics Denmark to implement the project, strengthen the capacity and improve the quality of official statistics. This project will also contribute to Vietnam’s sustainable development, especially when GSO implements the statistical development strategy for the 2021-2030 period with a vision toward 2045, Huong added.
GSO and its partners will create and elaborate on new ways to work with statistics and the presentation of data. Experts from Denmark will give direct inputs to the process and offer support in showcasing the best practices on data collection and processing, usage of statistics, communication and cooperation among public authorities and data suppliers.
Birgitte Anker, director general of Statistics Denmark, said, “Statistics Denmark is experienced in using administrative data sources to produce statistics. In addition, we have explored the opportunities in big data to produce both official and experimental statistics. We hope that this cooperation will create more knowledge on the Vietnamese society for evidence-based decision-making and monitoring of international agendas such as the SDGs.”
