In the light of the COVID-19 global pandemic, many containment measures have been put in place by Governments worldwide, such as lockdowns, changes to work modalities, travel restrictions and outlet closures. Such policies hinder statistical work, especially in areas requiring data collection through field visits, such as price statistics, which are no longer possible in many parts of the world. To assess the effect of COVID-19 and its consequent measures on the work of national statistical offices in Arab countries, and to find the best solutions to ensure the continuity of data collection and production of needed indices for socioeconomic analysis and policymaking, a questionnaire was designed and distributed to national statistical offices of ESCWA member States. Responses were received from the statistical offices of the following countries: Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, the State of Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. An analysis was conducted based on the those responses. In general, the pandemic has put a complete stop to statistical work in some countries, and affected data collection in others. Very few countries have experienced no impact at all. This highlights the need to introduce big data into statistical data collection after analysing its feasibility in each country, an initiative which ESCWA had already begun prior to the pandemic by conducting training for a pilot project on collection of price data through web scraping. Not only prices are affected: the GDP expenditure structure in most countries is expected to shift, depending on the duration of the pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 is having a stronger impact on prices in some countries compared with the others, especially in categories of household consumption which are mostly necessities. The pandemic will therefore strongly affect the purchasing power of currencies, and consequently the real sizes of economies and ranking of nations’ wealth.
1. Assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on statistics -- 2. ESCWA measures -- 3. Effect of COVID-19 on the real size of economies -- 4. Conclusion -- Annex Questionnaire.

12 p. : graphs, tables

Available online (viewed 30 July 2020).