Building national capacity for monitoring the economic development in an African country: The case of Malawi

From the early 2000s and over the course of more than a decade Norway has supported the development of statistics and economic planning in Malawi on a number of subject areas. A main area was support to economic statistics and planning. This included cooperation on the three major steps. Economic statistics providing annual information for the large enterprises and establishments and monthly price indices served as the base. This base supplemented by balance of payment statistics allowed for the compilation of national accounts information in current and fixed prices. In the next step the national accounts figures served as an input for the macro economic planning in the ministries. Support from Statistics Norway (SN) to the National Accounts Division in the National Statistical Office (NSO) has been one of the main pillars in this long term institutional cooperation. This report gives a detailed account of the development of the SN-NSO cooperation on National Accounts over these years. From the initial assessment it was clear that the national accounts work in NSO faced two major challenges, a need for technical development and a need to build and maintain sufficient staff capacity.

Authors: Liv Hobbelstad Simpson and Bjørn Wold