Statistics on Cultural Industries - International Trade Centre

and was carried out with technical and financial support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).The survey was carried out in the framework of a technical grant between ADB and NSB for theimprovement of the statistical system of Bhutan. The main scope of this grant was to developthe technical capabilities of the NSB. The BLSS survey was carried out by NSB staff trained by ADBconsultants who also supervised the various phases of the survey.The NSB plans to repeat the survey in 2008. The new round will hopefully be financed by thegovernment in recognition of the importance of the kind of data collected with this survey. Itis difficult to evaluate the quality of the data without a deeper study but the response rate isan impressive 97 percent, and the NSB seems very alert to the issue of data quality and ways toimprove the quality of some of the data in the next round of the survey.The Bhutan Living Standard Survey 2003 was an improved version of the Pilot Household Income andExpenditure Survey (HIES) carried out in 2000.The BLSS was designed to collect information on consumption expenditure from the householdsin order to assess people’s well-being and to construct a poverty line for the country. Moreover,BLSS collected data on housing, employment, health status, fertility, education, access to publicfacilities, assets ownership, service provision, and prices on various commodities. The questionnairewhich is reprinted at the back of the publication indicates that the data is considerably richer thanwhat is included in the publication.The geographical coverage extended to the entire area of Bhutan except for two rural areas thatwere excluded for security reasons. The population coverage included all households in the countryexcept diplomatic and expatriate households; members of cohabitation situations (monasteries,nunneries, hospitals, etc.); barracks of military and para-military forces, including the police.In order to establish a representative sample, the entire country was divided into three regions basedon the number of households and their geographic location. Each region was divided into sevenstrata (four urban and three rural). The final sample size for the survey was 4,120 households.The survey was carried out by a network of supervisors and enumerators who were trained in allaspects of the survey. This good preparation was reflected in the very low non-response rate of2.7 percent.As the Labour Force Survey only collects information on employed persons, the best source of dataon the non-formal sector is probably the BLSS. The 2003 BLSS questionnaire included questions thatmight make it possible to estimate, though very roughly, the percentage of households involvedin non-formal cottage or household industries. The 2003 survey included a module (Block 10 –Home-produced non food items) on the production of home items like textiles, bamboo products,wood products and cane products. The NSB did not publish the result for this module because ofthe poor quality of the data but the director is convinced that in the next round it will be possibleto invest in these aspects to improve the quality of data and to make estimates concerning theamount of home-made products and their value.As an output of the BLSS, the NSB has also recently published a Poverty Analysis Report (2004).Another major statistical achievement is the completion of the Population Census, the findings ofwhich were published in 2006 (previous censuses were undertaken in 1969 and 1980). One of themain results of the Census will be the creation of a system that links geographical and statistical73