The International Labour Organization has released an information guide on its Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives.
Adopted in October 2018, the Guidelines are the first international statistical standard on cooperatives and were developed to address the lack of statistics on cooperatives at global level. They cover concepts and definitions around cooperatives, types of cooperatives, statistical units, work in cooperatives, and ways of collecting, tabulating, and analysing statistical data on the sector.
The Guidelines were developed by the Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives (COPAC) and its technical work group (TWG) in close collaboration with the ILO. As a member of COPAC, the ICA contributed, along with its Committee of Cooperative Research (CCR) and the International Organisation of Industrial and Service Cooperatives (CICOPA). More on this here.
The new guide is aimed at staff in national statistics offices, government agencies responsible for cooperatives and cooperative federations; members of the cooperative movement; and researchers. It explains the need for reliable and comparable statistics on cooperatives, how the Guidelines can be used to support production of statistics on cooperatives and provides an overview of the further work needed to put the Guidelines into practice.
Since the adoption of the Guidelines, the ICA has included the main elements of the Guidelines in its membership renewal information and some research works, particularly with regards to adopting the cooperative classification proposed by the Guidelines.
The publication was funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea. Access the guide here.