United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO): use of GSBPM

13. Statistical activity of UNIDO started with establishment of Industrial Statistics database in 1977 to meet the internal needs of the organization for an accurate assessment of structure and growth of industrial sector. In terms of the external data sources UNIDO was dependent to the United Nations Statistics Division, which used to collect the data from national statistical offices. In 1993 UN Statistical Commission at its twenty-seventh session granted mandate to UNIDO in collaboration with OECD for collection, maintenance and dissemination of worldwide key industrial statistics.

14. Currently UNIDO maintains industrial statistics databases or INDSTAT databases which are regularly updated with the data collected from National Statistical Offices (NSOs) and OECD (for OECD member countries). UNIDO also collects national account related data from National Accounts Main Aggregate Database of UNSD, the World Development Indicators of the World Bank and other secondary sources. Further in this paper mainly the INDSTAT databases will be considered and other data sources will be mentioned only as needed as complimentary data for particular statistical dissemination products. Thus the statistical data production life cycle model of UNIDO (we do not talk about statistical survey life cycle) consists of collection, development, maintenance and dissemination of worldwide key industrial statistics at detailed sub-sectoral levels of the manufacturing sector of industrial production in individual countries.

15. The process of statistical production in UNIDO has an annual cycle and can be summarized as follows. Elsewhere in this document each phase of the lifecycle is described in more detail.

• Initialisation: [Q1] Pre-filling of the out-going UNIDO General Industrial Statistics Questionnaire with previously reported statistical data and metadata for their possible revision by the NSO. The questionnaire is created in Excel format in one of the three languages (English, French or Spanish) appropriate for the particular country. The prefilling is automated using the available data and metadata; 
• Data Collection (NSO): [Q2-Q3] The completed and returned to UNIDO by the NSO questionnaires (excel format, rarely hard copy) are entered into the system and are ready for further validation and processing;
• Data Collection (OECD): [Q3] Data for OECD member countries, collected through joint OECD/UNIDO questionnaire and transmitted to UNIDO (excel format) are entered into the system and are ready for further validation and processing; 
• Transformation/Processing: [Q3-Q4] The data collected from the primary sources are further transformed to a ready-to use data set. The data transformation is done in five stages, which not only constitute an operational framework for UNIDO statisticians, but also provides additional description of statistics (generated metadata which is attributed to each data item) to users.
•   Dissemination: [Q4-Q1] After undergoing the complete processing phase the incoming and generated data and metadata are stored in the databases and the databases and can be used for production of the recurrent statistical publications: International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics, INDSTAT and IDSB CD products, Web Country Statistics. 

16. Similarly to the survey life cycle defined by the METIS group, at the beginning can be an optional
'Need' phase in which the necessity of changes in the questionnaire and processing is analysed. If changes are required, the respective 'Develop and Design' phase is in order. For example this year the metadata part of the questionnaire was evaluated and modified, which included translation into the three supported languages (English, French and Spanish).

17. The following Table 1 shows the mapping between METIS survey live cycle phases and the phases in the
UNIDO production process. Essential difference is that there are no explicit preparation phases like 'Need', 'Design and develop', but always at the beginning of the statistical production cycle the current status is analysed and if necessary the questionnaire as well as the process are updated. Further, there is no 'Archive' phase, since as soon as the data are processed completely they are stored in the UNIDO statistical databases and there is no need of special archiving procedure.

Table 1: Mapping of the UNIDO cycle phases to these developed by the METIS group

26. In the rest of this section is described each single phase of the statistical production life cycle and for each phase the metadata used or created is specified.

Initialisation

27. The main output of this phase is the pre-filling of the out-going UNIDO General Industrial Statistics Questionnaire with previously reported statistical data and metadata for their possible revision by the NSO. The questionnaire is created in Excel format in one of the three languages (English, French or Spanish) appropriate for the particular country. The pre-filling is automated using the available data and metadata.

Data Collection

28. After receiving back the completed questionnaires, they are entered in the system for validation and
further processing. The excel file is read automatically in and the user has range of tools for validation, analysis, correcting etc. - see Figure 7. During the processing of the particular questionnaire with all data and metadata included it can be stored in the interim storage in XML format. The metadata can be edited or new can be entered - see Figure 8 and Figure 9.

29. The preparation of appropriate statistical metadata in support of the INDSTAT databases requires concrete
and well-documented metadata inputs from the primary data compilers. Thus, UNIDO requests NSOs to provide, together with available statistical data, such descriptive information through its industrial statistics country questionnaire. The key items for which the organization needs to obtain metadata include:

   o Name of the supplier of the statistical data (i.e. reporting agency),

   o Basic source of data (e.g., annual industry survey),

   o Data reporting system (major deviations from ISIC),

   o Reference period (e.g. calendar year),

   o Reference unit (type of statistical unit)
      i. Establishment ii. Enterprise
      iii. Other o Scope of the annual survey (type of reference units covered) - information on coverage and the cut-off size,

   o Employed method of data collection,

   o Employed method of enumeration (direct interview, mail or web-surveys),

   o Response rate,

   o Treatment of non-response,

   o Concepts and definitions of the variables on which data are reported (details about each indicator),

   o Related national statistical publications and

30. The provided metadata are sometimes not described from the viewpoint of international comparability but rather from the viewpoint of national standards. In such cases the UNIDO statistical staff re-describes/rearranges the provided metadata into explicit information for the deviation from the international standard. This is often a difficult task and requires additional metainformation from the concerned NSO.

31. Additionally to each data item in the questionnaire can be attached one or more metadata items (footnotes in the older UNIDO terminology), like "Missing because of confidentiality reasons" or combinations of ISIC codes like "1511 includes 1512", etc - see Figure 5. 32. The metadata that are provided by NSOs often do not explicitly indicate deviations from international standards. In such cases, UNIDO attempts to r-describe/re-arrange the provided metadata into explicit information concerning the deviations from the international standards. This is often a difficult task and requires additional clarifications from the concerned NSO.

33. Data for OECD member countries, collected through joint OECD/UNIDO questionnaire and transmitted to UNIDO (excel format) are entered into the system in a similar way and are ready for further validation and processing. These questionnaires do not contain metadata, which is extracted from other OECD publications - OECD (2003) Industrial Structure Statistics, Volume 1, Core Data 

Transformation/Processing

34. The data collected by UNIDO from the NSOs and further transformed according to the quality requirements
in the transformation phase constitutes the major source of data for several recurrent publications produced by PCF/RST/STA. The metadata collected from the NSOs together with the data undergoes the same transformation process as the data and is complemented by metadata generated by the transformation process. All resulting metadata, including the necessary structural metadata, are used in the dissemination process:

35. The data collected from the primary sources are further transformed to a ready-to use data set. The
data transformation is done in five stages, which not only constitute an operational framework for UNIDO statisticians, but also provides additional description of statistics (generated metadata which is attributed to each data item) to users. For details about these stages see UNIDO (1996), pp 6-8, only a brief summary is in order:
    i. Manual detection and if possible correction of obvious reporting errors. The data are kept in original form (Stage 1 data). These data are used for pre-filling the following edition of the questionnaire for the particular country;
    ii. Inconsistent data are corrected using supplementary information from national publications (Stage 2 data). Stage 1 and Stage 2 data are considered as official;
    iii. Data are adjusted to eliminate the departures from the level of ISIC aggregation using national and international sources or supplementary data (Stage 3);
    iv. Missing data are estimated by UNIDO statisticians applying related proportion or interpolation whenever applicable (Stage 4) and
    v. Provisional estimates are made for the latest year (Stage 5).

36. At the same time Source and Method metadata are maintained for each data item. If appropriate, redescription of the provided metadata from viewpoint of international comparability is performed.

37. During the processing period a range of descriptive metadata also requires updating such as country names, national currencies and country groups. For example in 1990's after the fall of USSR and break-up of Yugoslavia, a number of new sovereign states emerged in Euro-Asia region. On the other side 12 EU member countries adopted common currency Euro replacing the previous national currencies. More recent changes were related to the democratic republic of Timor Leste and Republic of Montenegro, also recently two more countries joined EU (Bulgaria and Romania) and two countries (Malta and Cyprus) adopted the Euro as national currency.

Dissemination

38. The data collected by UNIDO from the NSOs and further transformed according to the quality requirements
in the transformation phase constitutes the major source of data for several recurrent publications produced by PCF/RST/STA. The metadata collected from the NSOs together with the data undergoes the same transformation process as the data and is complemented by metadata generated by the transformation process. All resulting metadata, including the necessary structural metadata, are used in the dissemination process:

   o To define the dissemination products - for this purpose are used the structural metadata like country names and codes, currency names and codes, classifications, etc.;

   o To guide the dissemination process - for example the selection of data to be published in the different products depends on the degree of confidence they deserve as identified by the stage (metadata generated in the transformation process);

  o To provide users with the information they may need to interpret the disseminated data.

39. The International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics is the main UNIDO statistical product, which has been the most important medium of data dissemination for many years. The latest yearbook released in 2008 covered the data for the period from 1995 to latest year. The country data was updated for 74 countries and is compiled from the Stage 1 and Stage 2 (as described elsewhere in this document).

40. Another medium of UNIDO data dissemination are CD products, which might include data from all stages described earlier. The demand of CD products is increasing every year from national and international institutions, academia and researches. For information on purchasing procedures and licensing the readers should refer to www.unido.org/statistics . The latest release of the CD products in 2008 covered the following statistics as shown in Table 5.

41. Another form of data dissemination is providing statistics by selected variables from the different UNIDO databases for each member state which are posted in UNIDO web-site http://www.unido.org/statistics under the item Country Statistics. Country data in the web site are presented for several years together with the figures for the world and region for comparison over time as well as in relation to the region level.

42. Apart from the recurrent publications listed above, industrial statistics data can be disseminated on ad-hock queries mainly for internal but in some cases also for external users. 43. In the following Figure 10, Figure 11, Figure 12 and Figure 13 are shown examples of metadata shown in the different dissemination products.