November 4th 2019 Event in Brussels: Opportunities and Challenges of Statistics on the Social and Solidarity Economy

On 4 November 2019, the UNTFSSE, in collaboration with UNRISD, ICA, CIRIEC and Social Economy Europe, organized an expert workshop on the topic of “Opportunities and Challenges of Statistics on the Social and Solidarity Economy”, held in EESC’s office, in Brussels.

This page gathers key resources related to this event.

Key Messages

  • The demand for statistics on SSE which is needed for social and political recognition and government support is growing. Despite important work by national statistical agencies and researchers (academic and institutional) to develop methodologies and gather data at the national and international levels, many countries and regions lack statistical information about SSE in their territories and globally agreed statistical methods and indicators have yet to be established.
  • In that context, the UN DESA/Statistics Division Handbook on Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work has recently been promoted as a potential solution. It is a good manual for the purpose of measuring nonprofit institutions, but it fails to capture all social economy organizations. The main reason explaining this shortcoming is that the cardinal criteria defining social and solidarity economy is its contribution to economic democratization rather than its absence of profitability.
  • The UN Handbook should therefore either incur major revisions to better capture SSE or cease to claim that it can be used to measure the social economy sector. Another manual purely focused on SSE Statistics, building on CIRIEC’s previous work on the topic, could better address the task of providing guidelines to measure social economy.
  • The modular approach to satellite accounts used par the Portuguese’s national institute of statistics shows that it is possible to find compromises by referring to more than one satellite account framework, thus providing various types and levels of information to different audiences.

Documents

Powerpoint Presentations

English