Archive:Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) - a statistical portrait - introduction

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Data from May 2016. No planned update.

This article is an introduction to the online version of Eurostat’s publication Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) - a statistical portrait (also downloadable as a PDF). It provides a selection of statistics on the European Union (EU), Norway and Switzerland in comparison with 21 Asian ASEM partners. It aims to give an insight into a range of socioeconomic issues for the ASEM partners.

Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) — a statistical portrait

The use of the term European ASEM partners in this article refers to the 28 Member States of the EU, Norway and Switzerland. The use of the term Asian ASEM partners in this article refers to the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the 11 remaining ASEM partners referred to as Northeast and South Asia (NESA).

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Asia-Europe Meeting

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) was created in 1996 and has since become a key forum for dialogue and cooperation between Europe and Asia. Starting from the original 26 partners in 1996, ASEM currently has 53 partners, including: the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretariat and 51 countries. See Table 1 for a timeline of the expansion of the ASEM partners.

Table 1: Timeline of ASEM enlargement, 1996–2014
Source: ASEM Infoboard

ASEM provides a unique platform to bring Europe and Asia closer together on a number of issues of global importance, such as the revival of economic growth worldwide, climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Political dialogue in ASEM takes place at the highest level every two years, with a summit of Heads of State and Government where ASEM’s priorities are set. These summits are held alternatively in Asia and Europe.

The theme of the 11th ASEM Summit, hosted by the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar on 15–16 July 2016, is ‘20 Years of ASEM: Partnership for the Future through Connectivity’.

In the years between the summits, several other meetings of Ministers, officials and experts are held regularly to address political, economic, financial, cultural, social and education-related issues. Beyond government-level meetings, ASEM also brings together members of parliament, business sectors, civil society, youth, academia and media.

The EU is committed to supporting ASEM through the ASEM Dialogue Facility, a financing instrument created in 2008, which aims to provide a solid platform for sustainable ASEM cooperation, and to ensure balanced participation of less developed partner countries.

High quality statistics and capacity-building

As any other discussions on policy-making, the ASEM dialogue needs to rely on good quality statistics to analyse the situation and help identify the most appropriate policies to increase our welfare.

The need to address current global challenges is generating a growing demand for good quality statistics. Therefore, both European and Asian ASEM partners are very active — on national, regional and international levels — in promoting approaches to strengthen the relevance and comparability of statistical data.

ASEM partners are committed to complying with the United Nations (UN) Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, endorsed by the UN General Assembly resolution 68/261 of 29 January 2014.

In the EU context, the European Statistics Code of Practice has become the foundation of the quality framework on which the production of European statistics is based. The principles of the code set the standards with which the institutional environment of statistical authorities, the statistical processes and statistical outputs have to comply; hence, they are the guarantee of top statistical quality for users of European statistics.

The experience of the European Statistics Code of Practice is also becoming a reference for other partners in ASEM. In ASEAN, for example, it has inspired the ASEAN Community Statistical System Code of Practice, which was adopted by the ASEAN national statistical offices in 2012.

Ensuring good quality statistics is a common priority for all producers of official statistics in ASEM, and it is therefore essential to guarantee that no disparities in statistical capacity exist among countries. The need to address current global challenges puts additional pressure on national statistical systems. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a particular example of such a challenge and statisticians are playing an important role in the definition of the indicators that will help measure the implementation of the sustainable development goals. Capacity building for producing all these indicators based on sound methodology and corresponding to the required quality levels will be the focus of cooperation in statistics.

By working together to improve the quality of official statistics, it will be possible to meet user needs for the policy of sustainable development.

Publication structure and coverage

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) — A statistical portrait provides users of official statistics with a snapshot of the information that is available on Eurostat’s website and the websites of other international organisations. The publication provides indicators for a selection of topics; it is composed of an introduction, a special focus on changes over the 20 years since the first meeting in 1996, as well as five articles which provide information on different socioeconomic issues.

The publication aims to present information for the ASEM partners, including:

the European ASEM partners — the European Union, the 28 Member States of the EU, Norway and Switzerland;
the Asian ASEM partners — the ASEAN secretariat, the 10 members of ASEAN and the 11 remaining partners referred to in this publication as Northeast and South Asia (NESA).

Spatial data coverage

The geographical aggregates such as ASEM, EU-28, ASEAN and NESA include information for all of the partners or estimates for missing information; any incomplete totals, shares or ratios that are created are systematically footnoted. Time series for these geographical aggregates are based on a fixed set of partners for the whole of the time period (unless otherwise indicated). For example, any time series for the EU-28 refers to a sum or an average for all 28 current EU Member States regardless of when they joined the EU.

The order of the EU-28 Member States used in this publication follows the alphabetical order of their names in their national languages, whereas for all other ASEM partners the order follows their names in English. For the Asian ASEM partners the English names used are those normally used within the context of the ASEM. In many of the figures the data are ranked according to the values of a particular indicator. Where possible, data for European ASEM partners are shown in blue and those for Asian ASEM partners are shown in red.

If data for a reference period are not available for a particular ASEM partner or an aggregate, then efforts have been made to fill tables and figures with data for previous reference years (these exceptions are footnoted); generally this involved taking account of at least the two previous reference periods. In the event that data for a particular partner or an aggregate are not available at all the partner or aggregate has not been included in the tables and figures.

Data sources

The indicators presented are often compiled according to international — sometimes global — standards, for example, United Nations standards for national accounts and the International Monetary Fund’s standards for balance of payments statistics. Although most data are based on international concepts and definitions there may be certain discrepancies in the methods used to compile the data.

Almost all of the indicators presented for the EU (and its Member States), Norway and Switzerland have been drawn from Eurobase, Eurostat’s online database. In exceptional cases some indicators for the EU have been extracted from international sources, for example, when values are expressed in purchasing power parities (based on United States dollars).

For the Asian ASEM partners and their aggregates (ASEAN and NESA), the data presented in this publication have generally been extracted from a range of international sources. For the ASEAN aggregate some data for foreign direct investment have been drawn from the online data provided by the statistics pages of the ASEAN website.

For many of the indicators, multiple international statistical sources are available, each with their own policies and practices concerning data management (for example, concerning data validation, the correction of errors, the estimation of missing data, and the frequency of updating). In general, attempts have been made to use only one source for each indicator in order to provide a comparable analysis between the partners.

The international data sources are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: National and international data sources
Source: Eurostat

Aggregates

Aggregates for ASEM, the European ASEM partners and the Asian ASEM partners have been compiled from the data for individual partners as indicated above. As such, they may combine data from Eurostat and international sources.

Data for each aggregate have been compiled based on each aggregate's current composition, regardless of the time period presented. For example, data for ASEAN are always based on the 10 current members, even if old data are presented, for example from 1960.

Data extraction and processing

The statistical data presented in this publication were extracted during April and May 2016 and the accompanying text was drafted in May 2016. Eurobase, ASEAN’s statistics and international sources are regularly updated, frequently in some cases, so there may be differences between the data presented in this publication and any data that are subsequently downloaded.

Many of the international sources from which data were extracted present monetary data in national currencies and/or United States dollars (USD), whereas Eurostat data are normally presented in national currencies and/or euro (EUR). Monetary data for Asian ASEM partners have been converted into euro using current exchange rates. Data that are expressed in USD having been converted from national currencies using purchasing power parities have been left in dollar based purchasing power standards. Equally, time series for indicators expressed in constant prices have not been converted from the original currency (whether for national currencies or in USD).

Several indicators have been standardised by expressing their values relative to an appropriate measure of the size of a partner, for example, in relation to the total population or the size of the economy (gross domestic product (GDP)). Whenever possible, these size measures have been extracted from the same source as the indicator itself; otherwise these data have been extracted from the World Bank’s databases.

Data presentation

Many of the data sources contain metadata that provide information on the status of particular values or data series. In order to improve readability, only the most significant information has been included as footnotes under the tables and figures. Where appropriate, breaks in series are indicated in the footnotes provided under each table and figure. The following symbols are used, where necessary:

Italic: data value is forecasted, provisional or estimated and is likely to change;
billion: a thousand million;
not available, confidential or unreliable value.

Source data for tables and graphs

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