On October 21, 2019, the Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB), in partnership with Statistics Canada, launched a one-week training workshop on Statistical Business Registers at the SIB’s headquarters in Belmopan. Financial and technical assistance for this training was provided through the Government of Canada’s Project for the Regional Advancement of Statistics in the Caribbean (PRASC) and included participants from the Statistics Division of Antigua and Barbuda, along with staff from the SIB’s Economic Statistics, Data Dissemination, and IT departments.
A Statistical Business Register (SBR) is a continuously updated database of business establishments, containing information on various key characteristics of these establishments, such as contact details, type of economic activity, and number of employees. The SBR serves as a sample frame for business surveys, as well as a source of statistical information on the composition of the country’s economy at any given point in time. Under the guidance of the PRASC project, Belize and other Caribbean countries are in the process of constructing SBRs, utilizing data from various administrative sources.
The main objective of the workshop was to build capacity among subject matter and IT personnel in basic concepts related to Statistical Business Registers as well as the use, maintenance, updating and management of an SBR database system, developed by Statistics Canada for national statistics offices in the CARICOM region. Belize and Antigua and Barbuda are among the first countries to receive this training, which will considerably advance the development of their respective SBRs.
