C A R I B B E A N C O M M U N I T Y S E C R E T A R I A T

THIRTY- FIRST MEETING OF

THE STANDING COMMITTEE OF

CARIBBEAN STATISTICIANS SCCS/2006/31/27

Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

6-8 November 2006 7 November 2006

ST. LUCIA STATISTICS DEPARTMENT

PROGRESS AND PLANS

By Edwin St. Catherine, Director of Statistics

6-10 NOVEMBER 2006

Trinidad and Tobago

PROGRESS AND PLANS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS OF ST. LUCIA

During the past year a number of activities occurred which will form the basis for the further advancement of the Statistical Department in St. Lucia. This paper presents firstly, the changes that occurred over the past year and delineates the plans to be pursued for the rest of this year and the next year.

CHANGES IN STAFF STRUCTURE AND OFFICE INFRASTURCTURE

Staffing:

Most of the changes in the staff structure of the Department which has taken place in the last year has affected mostly the middle management within the Statistical Office. Most of this change has affected the positions of Statistical Clerks and Statistical Assistants. The policy of the Department has always been to encourage staff to seek for themselves further educational qualifications and training and to lay a strong emphasis on this. This policy manifests itself in ensuring that when staff has achieved significant milestones in their educational deployment to make a concerted and decisive effort to recognize these achievements.

During the past year, at the senior management level the only significant change which has occurred was the upgrade of the post of Director of Statistics to the level of a Permanent Secretary. This change does recognize the significant role that the statistical office, by providing relevant information in a timely manner has and intends to continue to make to the policy making and policy execution process in St. Lucia. The Statisticians who have joined the Department in the last two months of 2005 are now settled at their duties within the Statistical Office

During the course of the year the Statistical Office temporarily facilitated staff placements at other departments within the Government Service. Assistance for these moves came from the Ministry of the Public Service and the Public Service Commission. During a planned "Staff Development Week" activity, the Ministry of the Public Service and the Public Service commission were asked to make presentations to the staff and to discuss with the staff the possibilities for promotion and upgrading within the Statistical Office and also at the wider governmental level. Based on these discussions a number of members of staff particularly within the Trade Section of the Department were recommended for undertaking short periods of placement with other departments of Government. This was very helpful in giving staff a refreshed look at the public service. We have had many complaints from the staff about the routine nature of the work within the Trade Section of the department, this program of re-deploying some of the junior members of the Trade Section to other Government Ministries for periods of three months or less did help to re-kindle somewhat their interest in the work that they did.

The Statistical Office had for some time on Staff two temporary clerks without any qualifications. These were mature women who had performed their duties in a very dedicated and efficient manner as it related to the conduct of the various sample surveys that we undertake overtime. The Statistical Office recognized their dedication and work ethic and for an extended period of time paid them as casual workers however we encouraged them to seek the relevant O level qualifications for entry into the public service. These officers had made, perhaps more so than most of the Statistical Clerks a substantial contribution to the work of the Department in terms for their invaluable assistance to the process of questionnaire development and operational field activities. We were therefore very pleased to when having taken our advice pursued and we successful in obtaining O Levels, the department has rewarded their efforts and have promoted them in one case directly to the post of Statistical Clerk II and in another case to the post of Acting Statistical Clerk I.

Geographic Information Systems:

The Statistical Department has continued to actively work with a number of Ministries to develop specialized maps for data dissemination of census and other map products, we have education, planning and health regions delineated in the GIS. In addition, along with many pertinent pieces of information we have defined GIS point themes of all critical public buildings, schools, hospital, health centers etc. More recently with a view to better store, retrieve and maintain our visitation records we have decided to store them in MS Access tables linked to the GIS. Every new and updated visitation record will be stored in the GIS and will improve the volume of that on which spatial analysis can be conducted.

We have also been drawing, managing and maintaining all of the electoral district boundaries to facilitate the conduct of the next general elections constitutionally due by 2007. During last year and up till early 2006 our mapping section has generated electoral maps for all polling divisions on the island. This will has assisted the electoral department of St Lucia in a re-enumeration exercise which it is currently conducting and this will serve to establish the first fully digital representation of the island's electoral boundaries. We expect this to further enhance the relevance of our statistical datasets during the process of dissemination.

The Department using funds from the Survey of Living Conditions and Household Budgets 2005/2006 was able to purchase an upgrade to its ArcView 9.1 software. This upgrade to ArcEditor 9.3 brings with it significant additional software improvements to ArcView, such as more effective management of our ED boundaries, increased and improved abilities to use information generated by the Department of Surveys etc.. The acquisition of this software will substantially increase our ability to manipulate, maintain, model census and survey data using modern Geographic Information System techniques. Some of these GIS census data models are already expressed in various census data models implemented by the software developers at ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute). In addition, the Department of Statistics intends to continue to pay the annual 20% license fees to obtain upgrades and new versions of the software as it is released by ESRI.

In addition, it does appear very likely that the Statistical Department will be in a position to add at least another two Windows Mobile based GPS devices to it equipment list in this unit. The GPS's we have currently are over five years old and are in need of replacement. The funding for these replacement units will come from UNICEF and the EU with the rollout of Dev Info V5.0 that is being contemplated now.

In addition, during the course of the year the Statistical Department hosted the Department of Statistics of the Turks and Caicos Islands as well as the Suriname General Bureau of Statistics in undertaking an attachment in Geographic Information Systems at our offices. This training effort was led by our mapping Statistician, Mr Darrel Theobalds who was aided by Ms Sherma Lawrence.

Census:

During the course of the year the Statistical Department with the assistance of Ms Shameeda Mohammed completed the development of the redatam website for the Census 2001 dataset. The completion of this project was long overdue since it was first formulated in 2002/2003 but was hampered by numerous procedural problems presented by EU project requirements. In any case, this project was completed this year and has allowed us to put on the web, up to the level of the community detailed information in line with the Census Tabulation Plan (CARICOM Proposal RCCC Meeting November 2002, St.George's, Grenada). We have been training some of our more sophisticated users in its use and it has already proved to be a significant means by which the public can obtain the information they need, particularly the more sophisticated ones. We would like to thank CEPAL for assisting Ms Mohammed in this process and for hosting our census database on their website since we do not have the software specification to load the Redatam Webserver on our own website.

Hardware and software infrastructure:

As a result of 2005/2006 SLC/HBS Survey which we have recently completed the St Lucia Statistical Department acquired an HP 4350 DTLS printer. This printer enhances our capacity to print and prepare all our survey forms internally. This printer is being used to print, staple and sequentially bar code all scannable forms at a very inexpensive cost. This will further enhance our ability to execute and deliver results on surveys which we conduct on a regular basis. This has already yielded benefits and has provided critical printing redundancy to our Xerox Document Center as it relates to the constant printing of questionnaires required for ongoing quarterly labour force survey. Most of our forms are now TELEform templates suitable for scanning, we can readily print our own questionnaires using either the Xerox or the HP machine mentioned previously. We use our Fujitsu document scanners acquired during the census to capture all of our sample survey data.

In collaboration with the Government of Martinique the Land and Surveys Department of the Ministry of Planning recently acquired a new set of Satellite imagery which we have been using in updating all our ED maps. The imagery was acquired approximately two and a half years ago and will allow us to enhance the topographic shape files we currently hold of the Island. We currently have in the office a full set of satellite images obtained from the Lands and Surveys Department which we will be using to generate new and updated maps. Unfortunately these map are still just image files and have not yet been geo-referenced, we are still awaiting the geo-referenced topographic maps that can be generated from these images.

A number of IT related development activities which we engaged in during the course of the year are indicated below:

a) Purchase of a new Server and several new computers to enhance the IT infrastructure of the Department

b) Purchase of Maintenance for TELEform V9.1 and acquisition of TELEform V10 software

c) Purchased of SPSS V14 full license

d) Purchase of a three user site license for SPSS 15 is in process.

In collaboration with the Immigration Department of the Royal St Lucia Police Force the department has set up a Virtual Private Network link to the datawarehouse of the immigration department. With the increasing use of digital passports the Immigration Department has set up facilities to enter and scan passports. This will significantly enhance our ability to report on tourist related statistics based on a Cognos Cube housed at the Immigration Department which we can link to through the internet and download the most recent information available from the data Warehouse of the immigration department.

Training

The Department of Statistics has been quite active in this area over the past year; this activity is expected to continue throughout the up coming year unabated.

The following represent a list of activities which the Department has been involved with.

1) Six week training in Demographic Analysis on the campus of UWI in Trinidad and Tobago. This training effort supported by CARICOM and CELADE provided much needed training to a staff member of the St Lucia Statistical Office which was a very welcome activity. Our office had developed some weaknesses in this area with the departure of the Assistant Director of Statistics, Ms Jn Baptiste, therefore this training was a most useful event for our office. There were a number of things which was raised about the training which it may be useful to take on board. Firstly, the availability of books was a major problem, in the future every effort should be made to ensure that this matter is dealt with very early to ensure that students receive all of the information needed to apply themselves fully to the work programme of the course. Secondly, there were some complaints about accommodation which were voiced and finally the issue of insufficient time allocated to the material covered in the course was a major issue. Specifically the time allocated to the issue of demographic projections was specifically highlighted as one of major concern. Despite these issues we believe this course was a very important effort, as much as possible therefore efforts to mount a similar course in the future must be sustained.

2) Two members of our staff also attended a course in DEV INFO V5 in Barbados. We think this course was a substantial success. It has motivated the officers to collaborate with our parent Ministry and with line Ministries to roll out the system throughout the government service to enhance our capacity to collect and disseminate Statistics.

3) During the course of the year our office also obtained training in SPSS from two programmes of training mounted by the OECS Secretariat. This proved to be very beneficial to the statisticians, in particular the new statistician attending these training programmes. We have in one instance since a significant improvement in the quality and quantity of work performed by them in the last few months after the completion of the training programme.

4) Training in the compilation of health accounts was also received by members of Staff of the department. We have in collaboration with the Ministry of Health been working to develop these accounts. Recently, these tasks have been delegated to a member of staff of the National Accounts section of the department to ensure that it receives the attention it deserves.

5) Staff development week, mentioned previously saw the staff being exposed to various aspects of the work of the Statistical Department by Statisticians. This was an attempt by the department to help all members of staff understand in a more in depth way the operations of the office so they can assist in its development in a more holistic way.

6) Ms Sherma Beroo attended the IMF course in National Accounts Statistics.

TRADE STATISTICS

The trade section of the Statistical Department continues to maintain a lag in trade processing of no more than two month. We were able to provide data to all critical data users in St. Lucia by the end of January 2006 for the year 2005 for all classes of data on imports.

The statistical department publishes data in HS 96, HS 93, SITC rev 3, BEC, ISIC, CPC 1.0 formats. These additional nomenclatures have been made possible due to the installation of correlation tables obtained from the UN between the HS93 and the respective nomenclatures. The BEC trade classification in particular has assisted us immensely in publishing data on trade and trade indices in particular for the use of economist in a more meaningful manner. We now have the challenge of implementing HS 2007 with implementation of ASYCUDA ++ .

The department continues with its quarterly trade indices survey which had been established with the assistance of CARTAC (Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Center) working closely with a consultant from the Statistical Office of the IMF, Mr. John Sungren. The structure of these new indices will be based on the Balance of Payments (BOP), external trade and tourism data, while the price data for the indices primarily is being obtained through direct price surveys. It was decided to rely on direct price surveys because of the serious shortcomings detected in the unit value data derived from external trade values and volumes. The main difficulty with a sample survey based approach of this nature is the possibility of non-response, where this occurs we have used detailed data available from Customs Warrants as a substitute source. We realize that this approach will have a number of benefits primarily for the purpose of national accounts deflation and terms of trade analysis. The economy of St. Lucia is heavily dependant on the international price developments for its major exports (bananas and tourist services) and imports needed to produce them as well as the products consumed locally. In addition, the use of this approach also has as a central focus import and exports price indices of services generally but tourism services in particular, sold on the international markets. This represents a significant advantage over the goods centric approach which the development of import and export price indices directly from the goods trade involved in the past.

The department has been absorbing electronic data from ASCUYDA since the entire customs function is now fully computerized. This is what allowed us to produce data for 2004 and 2005 for some of our users on imports by the end of January 2005 and 2006 respectively. There has however been some major developments with the introduction of ASYCUDA++. From November 2005 at the Vieux Fort port and from April 2006 at the Castries port ASYCUDA++ has been implemented. This has created some significant problems for the quality and availability of the trade data. The introduction of ASYCUDA++ has created several issues, firstly the Statistical Office no longer receives paper documents from the Customs Department and consequently has access only to the electronic documents and paper invoices, secondly, the Ascii format files we previously received from the Customs has been changed and Customs has proposed sending us the data in XML format, for our purposes this format is fine, thirdly, Customs also run the ASYCUDA++ and ASYCUDA 2.7 format in parallel for a number of months and this has resulted in a duplication of trade transaction records inside the system. This has therefore erroneously increased the value of trade due the duplicated entries within the combined datasets coming from the ASYCUDA++ and ASYCUDA 2.7 systems. In addition, as of September 2006 Customs will only be using ASYCUDA ++ as the vehicle for the capture of Customs warrants. ASCUYDA++ has introduced a number of format changes to the ascii files sent to us from the customs department, for example, all Customs Procedure codes have been changed, there are five character port codes, all importers codes have changed etc...This new format has created significant problems for us since it requires a complete revamp of our system. This is the approach which we will be using to address this problem, we have developed a computer program to convert the ASCII files obtained from ASCUYDA ++ back to the original format. This will allow us to continue to generate trade data in the usual manner, we are now also developing a computer program to deal with the duplicates in the system also, this is however a temporary problem since the move to ASYCUDA ++ is fully implemented the systems will not be running in parallel anymore. This conversion will give us enough time to create a new set of procedures within the current version of EUROTRACE until we are in a position to fully implement this new schema for data handling within the Windows version of EUROTRACE. This type of development at Customs really upsets any processing done at the level of EUROTRACE but we want to use it to complete a full transition to EUROTRACE for Windows.

Since the conduct of the Eurotrace/ComExt training workshop we have deployed the Windows version of Eurotrace on our network. On the Server we have placed all the core files and referenced these files from the all the clients. We have the DBMS client part of the EUROTRACE for Windows software running in the Director's Office and also in the trade section of the office. The editor client is running on at least three machines within the Trade section of the Department. And the ComExt data dissemination portion is running on all machines including those of the statisticians, where they are able to reference all of the databases available for dissemination. We used the software to design our own local Customs/CARISAD form. We also have so far loaded all the information we have on a monthly basis from 2000 to the present. The intention is to load all years dating back from 1992. The issues with the implementation of this new version of ASYCUDA ++ will affect our implementation of EUROTRACE for windows since we will have to redo the entire system, we will however have to wait till the introduction of HS 2007 to effect this change.

SURVEYS

The Statistical Department has been very active in this area this year, much more so than usual due to the demands emanating from the public sector, our own internal sample survey programme and greater collaboration which we have developed with the National Insurance Cooperation (NIC). We have successfully completed a number of surveys during the year and the reports and/or tables are available for some of these surveys. Of particular note is the completion of the Survey of Living Conditions and the Household Budgetary Survey, to date we have produced a preliminary consumer prices basket index. The following is a list of the surveys performed which are not part of the on-going survey programme of the Statistical Department.

Name of Survey	Date Survey was Taken	Published Report/Data Tables
Survey of Living conditions and Household Budgets 2005	August 2005 to February 2006	Survey is complete and Draft reports on the welfare indicators have been generated from the survey. There is also a new CPI basket which has been generated from the Survey.
National Insurance Survey of all establishments	July 2005	Public Perceptions of the National Insurance Scheme
Unemployment Survey 2005/2006	July 2005 to March 2006	Survey is in progress
Environmental Surveys (Environmental Unit Ministry of Planning)	April/May 2006	Data processed and generated on Environmental Awareness
Roving Care-Givers Survey	July/August 2006	Data captured and processing has began, report has not yet been finalized

One of the main activities we engaged in this year was the data capture/processing and tablulation of the Survey of Living Conditions and Household Budgets for 2005/2006. We did benefit from the administrative efficiency and cost savings of running two surveys in one, being careful to ensure that the important aspects of both operations were preserved. The following are some of the unique features of this survey which I believe are important to note:

1) The Survey of Living Conditions is combined with the Household budget survey. The main concern about combining these two surveys have been the length of the survey, we have attempted to counter this providing a monetary incentive to the household particularly for the completion of the Daily Diary of expenditure booklets. To increase the participation of individual members of the household in the completion of the diary by the use of a "memory jogger" for use by all household spenders.

2) The questionnaire was developed exclusively for scanning thus eliminating the need for extensive coding of products and services using COICOP typical of Household Budget Surveys.

3) We built a lot of the aggregations and validations into the electronic scanning template, upfront. This will minimized greatly the time it took to produce a clean set of preliminary welfare based results from the survey and the Consumer Basket Index which we have built, we anticipate that in the coming months we will be in a position to put in place a new consumer basket of goods within the context of CPI calculations.

4) We are paid household spenders for their participation in the survey, this we have realized resulted in the following

i) greater response rate

ii) more cooperation by household spenders in particular, as the incentive is directed mainly at the household spender

5) The survey was designed to cover a low period, namely the months of August to November 2005 and high season months namely December to February 2006, this has did generate enough responses to allow the computation of all the poverty indicators by June 2006 following which the draft report on Poverty and living conditions was represented to the Government of St Lucia by July 2006.

6) The SLC/HBS 2005 questionnaire design benefited from the efforts of many persons. The OECS Mecovi Project supported financially the design of this instrument. The CDB contracted Kairi team of consultants designed a number of SLC questionnaires on which the individual questionnaires for this survey was initially based. This questionnaire also benefited from many improvement suggested by the work of MECOVI consultant Ms Linda Hewitt who also was very much involved in the design of the new SLC questionnaire which is now being analyzed for Trinidad and Tobago. Also, Dr Vanus James flew into St. Lucia on his own funds to make a contribution to the effort much of his ideas were incorporated into the final design of the questionnaire.

In addition to this the Department continued some of its normal survey programme consisting at its core of the Labour Force Survey. This survey has been done on a quarterly basis since 2002; the year after the Census, although the sample size has not increased. The sample frame, from which this survey is drawn, has been re-designed completely based on the Census 2001 data to reflect the new occupational stratification inherent in the Census 2001 data. As of the present almost all of the TELEform based processing systems have been redesigned and I believe we have a truly efficient system producing with about one month of lag a dataset on the Labour Force which has been published up to the first two quarters of 2006. We are about to release the results for the 3rd Quarter of 2006. The strategy change to producing quarterly data allows for more frequent and meaningful publication of results, in addition, we have added an ICT module to this survey which will allow the constant monitoring of internet, cellular and other important high growth areas in information, communication technology. We also intend to use this additional module to capture on occasions some household based living conditions indicators, such as, number of rooms, number of bedrooms, appliances within the home etc.. The balance of payments surveys overall response rate improved substantially from 65 % in 2004 to 90% in 2006. This was largely due the joint data gathering effort which we mounted with the ECCB. We has also been quite successful with the data gathering efforts for the national accounts survey 2006.

NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

The Status of the National Account particularly as it relates to the implementation of SNA '93 follows:

The balancing of the Supply and Used Table (supply with demand) is target for November 27, 2006.
A product list categorized by CPC 1.0 and an industry list defined by using ISIC Rev. 3.1 has been established. One hundred products and forty five industries have been defined for St.Lucia.
Imports/exports of goods and services and production data was used to derive the product (commodities) list.
The consultant recruited by CARTAC, Mr. Craig Gaston identified the following task necessary for the completion of the exercise on the SUT. They are:-

Task One:

Complete the estimation of production and use for the remaining industries:

Agriculture, livestock and forestry
Restaurants (problem with sample for bars)
Distribution (compensate for incomplete sample)
Air and Sea Transport
Electricity
Water

Task Two:

Attempt to estimate commodity margins for major goods by comparing producer and retail unit prices. This will be complicated for many goods because of the differing units of measure but any information we can obtain will improve the margin estimates.

The results of the 2005 HBS is now available. Work is now in progress to reclassify household expenditures from COICOP to CPC and to deflate the data therein to 2002, using the CPI .

St Lucia's Supply and Used Table will be available January, 2007.

Demography and Social Statistics

This section of the Department monitors the vital registration system of St. Lucia and publishes this information annually in a publication entitled The St. Lucia Vital Statistics Report. This report covers information on teenage pregnancy, mortality, population growth and population projections, births, deaths etc. Much of this information is collected on an on-going basis by district and can therefore be disaggregated in that way for more detail where necessary. We will also be submitting to this meeting a separate report on the activities related to the implementation of DEV INFO 5.0 to date.

Environmental Statistics:

A report covering the period 2004 - 2006 is due to be released shortly.

SNA 2002

Saint Lucia National Accounts

2006

Status Report

Summary

The balancing of the Supply and Used Table (supply with demand) is target for November 27, 2006.
A product list categorized by CPC 1.0 and an industry list defined by using ISIC Rev. 3.1 has been established. One hundred products and forty five industries have been defined for St.Lucia.
Imports/exports of goods and services and production data was used to derive the product (commodities) list.
The consultant recruited by CARTAC, Mr. Craig Gaston identified a the following task necessary for the completion of the exercise on the SUT. They are:-

Task One:

Complete the estimation of production and use for the remaining industries:

Agriculture, livestock and forestry
Restaurants (problem with sample for bars)
Distribution (compensate for incomplete sample)
Air and Sea Transport
Electricity
Water

Task Two:

The results of the 2005 HBS is now available. Work is now in progress to reclassify household expenditures from COICOP to CPC and to deflate the data therein to 2002, using the CPI .

St Lucia's Supply and Used Table will be available by the first quarter of 2007.

Tasks to Accomplish For November 27 2006 Visit

Complete estimation of 2005 HBS results. We now have most of the detailed items but they must be coded to the CPC classification. Strictly speaking, these estimates should be deflated to 2002 prices using the CPI. In reality, the HBS data will underestimate actual expenditures and this will likely be more important than any price change. However, it would be good to begin with the best possible estimates. (Mr. St. Catherine)
Complete the estimation of production and use for the remaining industries:

Agriculture, livestock and forestry
Restaurants (problem with sample for bars)
Distribution (compensate for incomplete sample)
Air and Sea Transport
Electricity
Water

Enter all the production and use data in SLu_SUT_02 according to the revised industry classification. (All staff)

Make a rough estimate of the amount of domestic production of goods that is purchased by the distribution industry. We have made a rough estimate but some verifications must be made. (allocation of production.xls
Estimate tourist expenditures using CTO data. Check to see if it is possible to obtain information on duty-free purchases by commodity. If not, we can use the data from Barbados (HHLD and tourism expenses Barbados 2000.xls. Compare accommodation expenditures to hotel revenues. If possible, do this for more than one year. Check with CTO to get all available information on expenditures. (Majella, Prunella)
Estimate commodity margins using mark-up ratios by 4-digit ISIC industry and commodity purchases by these industries. Commodity purchases are a combination of imports (including duties) and domestic production sold to distributors. Check to see that estimated purchases for each industry are at least as big as imports plus duties. Initially, we are forced to assume that every commodity sold by the same distribution industry has the same mark-up. This can be modified using spreads in unit prices (see next task). (Sherma, Craig)
Attempt to estimate commodity margins for major goods by comparing producer and retail unit prices. This will be complicated for many goods because of the differing units of measure but any information we can obtain will improve the margin estimates. (Richard?)
Obtain information on excise taxes for alcohol, tobacco and any other products.

Questions

FISIM. Is there any basis for allocating intermediated funds to industries and households? In Barbados we had bank deposits by industry. There is some information published by the Central Bank. Need more details.
Is the international business corporations sector very large? Can we get any information on their local expenditures or even just the number of firms? Possibly.
Is it possible to identify the imports of materials for construction projects not done by local firms? Not specifically, however, there is a large import of fabricated metal products by Public Administration, that may correspond to the construction by some donor country. Also, why did the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism import $16 M of grain and sugar?

Tourism

Significant work was undertaken to increase the sample size of establishments targeting in particular the larger ones which represent approximately 80% of the total population obtaining information for 11 out of 14 of the large establishments (70 employees and up). Response for the smaller establishments was not as great due to a lack of accounting records kept by these smaller establishments.

The estimates for production and use for hotels and restaurants are completed with the exception of the bars. This was as a result of a very small sample size, low response rate and poor record keeping by the smaller establishments. We are at present receiving assistance from the Inland Revenue Department and the National Insurance Cooperation in estimating output for them.

There were unreasonably high travel agency commissions reported by some hotels. After discussions with Mr. Gaston (SUT consultant), we have decided to treat all amounts in excess of 20% (average percentage of travel agent commissions to room revenue) as retained profit.

With the assistance of Mr. Griffith from CTO we are presently attempting to estimate tourist expenditures using the VEMS (Visitor Expenditure and Motivation Survey) database provided by the St. Lucia Tourist Board.

Manufacturing/Mining & Quarrying, Electricity & Water

Complete the estimation of production and use for the remaining industries:

Agriculture, livestock and forestry
Restaurants (problem with sample for bars)
Distribution (compensate for incomplete sample)
Air and Sea Transport
Electricity
Water

The estimation of valued added for Electricity and Water remains a vexing issue since procurement of the relevant details of output and intermediate consumption is proving most difficult. However, I have made the final decision to meet with the financial controllers of both utility establishments so as to derive an apposite method of disaggregating. By the grace of Allah/God/Jah, this task should definitely be complete in time for the November mission.

The Wholesale/Retail industry

All data for this industry has been entered. I am currently cleaning up the data (sorting out discrepancies, making adjustments where necessary) and calculating commodity margins.

The Agricultural industry

For bananas all the data is in - again discrepancies are being addressed and adjustments being made (data was obtained from several sources with different time periods therefore data has to be adjusted to reflect 2002).

Crops - all data for crop production is in, but it is difficult to estimate some of the costs associated with the production activity, like capital formation, due to lack of data. I am currently using a round about method to get there but it is a bit time consuming.

Fisheries - Good headway has been made because of available data from fishing co-operatives. However efforts are being made to capture some other fishermen's expenditure that was not recorded.

Livestock - Livestock was the most difficult portion of the agricultural industry. The 1996 agricultural census was the main source of data for livestock. Moving that data to 2002 was tedious, because data on the livestock slaughtered the life span of the animals and birth rate of each animal was needed. The visitation records from the 2001 census were quite helpful. To date work is still being done with the data. All the information has not been entered, but it will be in due time. The other problem with livestock was ascertaining the maintenance and production costs incurred by the average livestock farmer. I have obtained some data from Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock Division, which I am currently using.

Forestry - Data is trickling slowly. Data on forestry activity is not readily available, however efforts are being made to gather as much as we can.