The International Comparison Program (ICP) team at ESCWA’s Statistics Division has been working towards the regular production of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) through the implementation of a PPP production round in 2016.
This round is a regional initiative which will result in the production of PPPs, Price Level Indices, Real National Accounts Expenditures and other indices at the level of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its aggregates for 2016-2015-2014. This initiative ensures the regular production of PPPs in the Arab region considering their vast economic and social uses –such as their contribution in monitoring Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)- and aims to develop national statistical capacities in the production of accurate and reliable price statistics through regularly providing detailed high quality price and national accounts expenditures data.
Under this framework, a regional workshop attended by price experts from 11 ESCWA member states was conducted in April 2017 and included:
-Presentation of the innovative extrapolation/retrapolation methodology to be used for computing PPPs for 2015-2014 and which had been developed by ESCWA’s ICP team and recommended by the World Bank for use in other regions;
-Revision of methodologies for non-household consumption surveys: private education, government compensation, machinery and equipment, rentals, construction;
-Finalizing national surveys for household consumption and non-household consumption through intra-country and inter-country data validation and cleaning using diagnostic tables, thus enhancing national validation capacities and improving the quality of price statistics;
-Launching the regional work on the 2017 global ICP round.                                                                                                               
Western Asia gained global recognition through the endeavors pursued under the ICP framework aiming to develop the region’s price statistics, improve the statistical infrastructure and output, and achieve higher integration between price statistics, placing it ahead of other regions after it was commended by the World Bank for being the only region alongside Eurostat-OECD to produce annual PPPs.