Discussant's comments on "Impact of globalisation on traditional statistical systems".

The objectives of this session were to identify globalisation issues that require action from the statistical community as well as to discuss future actions by the NSIs and international statistical organisations. At the session on the “Impact of Globalisation on Traditional Statistical Systems”, three invited papers were presented. These three papers emphasise different aspects of the subject matter. The paper submitted by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE, France) has a national concern and discusses why statisticians have to consider and measure financial results, assets and liabilities of subsidiaries abroad in order to assess profitability within the national territory. The paper by the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) concentrates on the role and influence of multinational companies (MNC) and the types of statistics that are required to answer those questions, i.e. “totality of the whole picture of multinationals”. The paper by the Office for National Statistics (ONS, United Kingdom) attempts to approach the subject matter both at the national and at the international level, i.e. ”looking at the elephant and understanding its various parts”. 1. ONS, UK: Globalisation – new needs for statistical measurement After discussing several measurement, classification and coverage issues, problems of national units in multinational enterprises, BoP and electronic trade issues, the ONS paper concludes by emphasising the need to understand and improve the data collection in these fields and the need to clarify the relationship between national and business accounting. The paper discusses the subject matter in a very detailed way and brings into mind several concerns. The following are especially worth highlighting: – Coordinated use of standards – Recording production of services according to the CPA (Classification of Products by Activity) is not compatible with export and import recording of services according to EBOPS (Extended Balance of Payments Services). As pointed out in the paper, efforts should be made to ensure that BoP reporting and other national reporting are compatible. – Transfer prices – Transfer pricing has a crucial impact on income and cost statements of the MNCs. But how should we address this very important quality issue? National laws on statistics in most countries do not let NSIs gather data from the MNCs as such.