Sarajevo/Vienna – Monitoring Committee of the South East Europe 2020 growth Strategy (SEE 2020) met at its regular third annual meeting in Vienna today, organised by the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC). 

“Monitoring of the SEE 2020 Strategy implementation should be looked at as one of the means used by SEE economies - owners of the Strategy, for speeding up the convergence between the EU and themselves in the acquis in the field of statistics (Chapter 18/Statistics), as the SEE 2020 was inspired by EU's own Europe 2020 Strategy and accepted as an important building block in process of the EU integration of SEE economies”, said Gazmend Turdiu, RCC Deputy Secretary General while stressing the importance of a thorough and studious SEE 2020 implementation monitoring cycle(s).

The working session provided an overview of the current monitoring cycle 2016/2017, more specifically an overview of the process of collection of the quantitative data available from the national statistical and administrative source.

As per conclusion from the previous meeting of the SEE 2020 Monitoring Committee the RCC prepared and presented the Monitoring Lessons Learned Document (MLLD) based on the 2016 monitoring cycle that identifies key challenges but also proposes new solutions and recommendations for improvement of the Monitoring cycle in the next year. This meeting represented a kick off of the next monitoring cycle, at which the list of indicators was approved and procedure of data collection agreed.

SEE 2020 Monitoring Committee, bringing together representatives of the statistical systems and the policy makers from each of SEE 2020 participating economies, is in charge of overseeing the overall process of monitoring the SEE 2020 Strategy that also helps optimise the process, modifies the scope of monitoring as necessary, and reports to the SEE 2020 Governing Board on issues pertaining to monitoring and implementation of the SEE 2020 Strategy.