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Measuring Cooperatives: An information guide on the ILO Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives

This document provides a broad audience with information on the Guidelines on Cooperative Statistics, the Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives adopted at the 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in October 2018. The Guidelines were developed in response to a resolution adopted at the 19th ICLS in 2013 which recommended that the International Labour Office undertake further work to develop tools to measure the performance of cooperatives worldwide.

The Guidelines describe the concepts, statistical units, definitions and classifications needed to produce internationally comparable statistics on cooperatives, types of cooperatives, members and work in cooperatives. However, it does not provide information on how to analyse the statistical data, nor does it provide comprehensive information on their implementation. It simply highlights the need for further methodological and experimental work on data collection, as well as on the measurement of the economic contribution of cooperatives.

This new document does not yet cover the methodological work, as this has not yet been completed. The guide does not describe the operational steps needed to collect, analyse and disseminate statistics on cooperatives. It is therefore not a manual for implementing the guidelines. Rather, it aims to explain why reliable and comparable statistics on co-operatives are needed, how the guidelines can be used to support the production of statistics on co-operatives, and to outline the additional work required to implement the guidelines.

Essential first steps will be to establish the requirements for statistics on cooperatives at national level, to understand the cooperative landscape in each country, to assess the currently available statistics and identify improvements and potential new sources of data needed to fully implement the Guidelines

Many persons contributed to the preparation of this information guide. First and foremost, David Hunter, an ex-officio member of the ILO; Simel Esim, Dong Il Choi and Heejin Ahn, at ILO COOP; Lara Badre and Adriana Mata-Greenwood, as statisticians, and International experts on statistics of cooperatives: Prof. Marie J. Bouchard (University of Quebec in Montreal) and Dr. Chiara Carini (EURICSE).

This information guide was funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea.

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CIRIEC-International CIRIEC-España Social Economy Europe Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social Unión Europea