UNIDO – as a specialized UN agency in industrial development - has a mandate of collecting and disseminating industrial data globally. It maintains an international database of detailed business structure statistics by 151 manufacturing sectors and sub-sectors. While data in such details are of great interest to the academic and research community, policy makers quite often prefer more synthesized statistics which guide them in evidence-based policy decisions. This paper describes the methods and procedures applied by UNIDO in compiling the statistical indicators of industrial performance for international comparison. Creating of a much smaller number of industry groups derived from the international standard industrial classification (ISIC) has been one of the effective methods in this process. There is an intense statistical work behind the scene, which defines the classification criteria such as technology intensity, energy-input ratio and share of output measures. The paper presents some results used for comparison of countries in their industrial performance.

Keywords: Industrial performance; Derived classification; Taxonomy

Biography: Education: Ph. D. in Economic Statistics, 1986

Employment: Joined UNIDO in 2005, Chief Statistician of UNIDO since 2008

1997 -2004 Worked as an international expert in many countries of Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa in statistical capacity development projects

1987- 1997 Statistician of the Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal

Fields of interest and other activities:

– Survey methods, economic statistics

– Worked in the several international expert groups

– Author of various works on survey design and economic statistical topics

Professional Affiliation: A member of ISI and IASS.