Strategic actions to support energy statistics

This document “20 strategic actions for energy statistics” has been drafted in 2016 by the IEA under theEU4Energy programme to support the 11 countries of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia in elaborating action plans for the development of their energy statistics. EU4Energy is a 4 year action supported by EU funding, with the objective of promoting evidence-based policy-making in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The document focuses on three aspects of energy statistics central to the EU4Energy programme and the development of statistics in the focus region: improving energy data quality, but also ensuring that statistics publications do not stay on the shelf, by encouraging their wide dissemination and use to support policy-making. The document is available both in English and in Russian. It explains actions that could be undertaken to improve statistics, drawing on the experience of the IEA’s participation in regional energy statistics programmes (such as INOGATE and MEDSTAT), discussions with the focus countries during the inception year and extensive work published by the international statistics community, but not always available in the working languages of the focus countries.

The IEAforEU4Energy programme team made a deliberate choice not to prescribe a fixed set of recommendations to the countries, but present a wide range of actions, from which countries could choose depending on their own priorities, level of development and resources. The resulting country action plans were presented by the national statistical offices to government officials in the second EU4Energy statistics network meeting in Astana in June 2016. They all pursue the same goal of “improving energy data quality, dissemination and use” while reflecting the national priorities of each country and the diversity of the EU4Energy focus region. As this document was designed for a very diverse group of focus countries, we hope it will be beneficial for all countries that aspire to improve energy statistics in order to support evidence-based energy policies.