Cuba improves and updates its National Statistical System

 HAVANA, Cuba, Apr 14 (ACN) In line with its effective and efficient government program, Cuba is working on the project for the Improvement of the National Statistical System, which will allow to better collect, process and integrate -from the territories and by sectors or activities- the essential information for decision making at all levels and for different studies.

Given its importance, in a meeting to analyze the results of the actions carried out during the past two years and the projections for 2023, Alejandro Gil Fernandez, Cuban deputy PM and Minister of Economy and Planning, pointed out as a first priority that it should be able to measure the impact of the transformations of the Cuban economic model.

Before executives and experts from the National Statistics and Information Office (ONEI by its Spanish acronym) and several agencies, he said that the National Economic and Social Development Plan and every possible project must be provided with indicators that allow assessing how much progress is being made or not, based on the comprehensiveness of that information, its reliability and official primary registration.

Engineer Mercedes Hilda Gonzalez Guilarte, first deputy chief of ONEI, explained the importance of the project for what it can represent in the organizational, structural, methodological, technological and legal order, that is, its benefits are multiple, by establishing the general bases in the collection of all information, its classification and processing.

Both she and experts from other organizations agreed that in the country there is a dispersion of statistics, a lack of coherence and integrality, and even information gaps, absence of primary records and methods to obtain the data, and this makes it necessary to standardize the processes of statistical production.

Gonzalez Guilarte stated that having a modern and improved National Statistical System can contribute, for example, to the assessment of the results of the upcoming National Population and Housing Census, or the implementation of the Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security Law, approved by the Parliament last year.

The first deputy chief of ONEI and PhD Ramon Pich Madruga, director of the World Economy Research Center, stressed in turn that globally the use of open data is an international practice in which Cuba needs to advance, and even in terms of foreign investment, interested entrepreneurs themselves often request updated information.