especially at a time when there are restrains on government spending or costcutting budgetary reforms.
The outward-oriented growth strategy adopted by and large across the region has caused the interdependence of the national economy with the world to increase dramatically and this will intensify in the future. This has several ramifications. For one, the globalization of business activities at regional and world levels is often accompanied by a strong deregulation that sees traditional statistical sources disappear. This poses major challenges as the alternative of getting data through surveys is faced with greater reluctance of firms to respond citing response burden and data confidentiality. For another, greater international linkage through trade and capital flows has created new and far reaching data demands. These include data concerning productivity, business costs, exchange rates, interest rates and financial statistics; quick and shortterm macro statistics for formulating fiscal and monetary policies; indices on early warning signals of business cyclical swings; and the use of advances in computing and information technology to generate data and better manage and disseminate information.
In order to enhance the temporal and spatial comparability of statistics, statisticians at the national level must also improve and harmonize statistics within their statistical systems, as well as with other countries through common classifications, definitions and possibly questionnaires and methods. The Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS) and the General Data Dissemination Systems (GDDS) introduced by the International Monetary Fund soon after the Mexico's financial crisis, demonstrated the importance of transparency of macro economic performance and policy, and the need of disseminating essential, reliable and timely data to market participants. Many of the national statistical offices have expressed reservations on meeting these standards because of the lack of resources and expertise.
In terms of international comparability, the 1993 System of National Accounts (SNA) serves as a good statistical framework to start with. It is an accounting framework for defining economic relationships within nations, and among nations, so that a consistent set of statistics can be established to reflect
