On October 3rd, the management and specialists of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had a meeting with the representatives of the World Bank (WB) mission from the Poverty and Equity Program, with the office in Washington, Trang Nguyen, senior economist, and Kristina Vaughan, economist, who were on a working visit to our country during October 3-6.

The subject of the discussions primarily concerned the joint actions carried out at present. These include the preparation and planning of testing the Survey Solutions application, developed by the World Bank, for the collection of data in the Household Survey (HBS) through interviews with the use of electronic devices (Computer-assisted Personal Interviewing - CAPI) - as a modern method of data collection among households.

During the meeting, the management of the NBS expressed its gratitude for the support provided by the WB in reforming national statistics, especially in the field of living standards and poverty measurement, in accordance with international standards and best practices in statistics, thanking for the projects carried out so far with the support of the BM, within which the NBS benefited from technical assistance in various areas of statistical activity, among which the last support was for the improvement of the Household Budget Survey (Survey) tools in order to improve the response rate and, consequently, the quality of the data.

Also, during the meeting, additional topics of possible cooperation between the NBS and the WB were addressed that require technical assistance and international expertise regarding the full transition to the collection by the CAPI method for continuous statistical survey in households, the reorganization and modernization of the single network of interviewers and observers of NBS, implementing the new master sample, strengthening the capabilities of NBS specialists in the R language.

A separate topic of the discussions referred to the implementation in the Republic of Moldova of the Population and Housing Census planned for the year 2024 and the perspectives of cooperation in order to support this exercise of great statistical complexity.

Additionally, it is worth mentioning that, since the application of the Regulation on access to individual data for scientific purposes (approved by NBS Order No. 51 of 31.12.2021), researchers from the World Bank office have been rather active in requesting access to NBS microdata, in particularly those from the HBS, the Labor Force Survey (LFS) and the Structural Survey in Enterprises - the next scientific survey project for which they will be used is the assessment of poverty in the Republic of Moldova planned for the current year, being disseminated in June 2023.