The European Parliament adopted, by 664 votes to 10 with 15 abstentions, a legislative resolution amending the proposal for a decision of the European Parliament and of the Council on a Programme for the Modernisation of European Enterprise and Trade Statistics (MEETS). The report had been tabled for consideration in plenary by Christoph KONRAD (EPP-ED, DE), on behalf of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. The amendments were the result of a compromise between Parliament and Council.
The main amendments - adopted under the 1st reading of the codecision procedure - were as follows:
Duration: the MEETS Programme shall start on 1 January 2009 and shall end on 31 December 2013.
Objectives: the Programme will aim to:
- review priorities and to develop target sets of indicators for new areas; (objective 1);
- achieve a streamlined framework of business related statistics; (objective 2);
- support the implementation of a more efficient way of producing enterprise and trade statistics; (objective 3);
- modernise the data collection system on trade in goods between Member States (Intrastat); (objective 4);
Actions: actions under objective 1 will include identifying areas of lesser importance and developing new areas. With regard to identifying areas of lesser importance, the amended Annex states that in a changing world, statistical needs will be reviewed periodically as not only new statistical needs emerge, but other needs become less important and even obsolete. Regular reviews of priorities will therefore be conducted in close cooperation with Member States in order to identify areas and characteristics which have lost priority and consequently can be deleted from the legal requirements. Those reviews, aiming to simplify statistical requirements and reduce the response burden, may require external studies to be launched by the Commission.
With regard to new areas, the Annex notes that in a changing economic environment, it is important to define priority areas for statistics, like trade in services, globalisation and entrepreneurship, and to agree at Community level on a target set of indicators for each of the priority areas. Those indicators need to be harmonised with international statistics to the extent possible. The statistics have to be compiled in an efficient way and need to be comparable. European statistics must be modernised in strict accordance with the principle of coherence and comparability of data for the periods concerned. Work must therefore be carried out within the European Statistical System to achieve harmonised definitions of newly identified characteristics and indicators.
Evaluation: by 31 December 2010, and thereafter on an annual basis until 2013, the Commission shall submit to the European Parliament and the Council a report on the implementation of the MEETS Programme.