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EU wants to be part of Azerbaijan’s modernization

27 January 2016 22:53 (UTC+04:00)
EU wants to be part of Azerbaijan’s modernization

By Nigar Orujova

The European Union has been a long-term partner of Azerbaijan in many areas; it has a long-time cooperation with the country and wants to be a part of the modernization of Azerbaijan in the future.

EU Baku office head Malena Mard made the remarks while speaking at the event dedicated to implementation of the project to improve the national statistics system in line with European standards in Baku on January 27.

Mard said statistics will remain a very important area for the EU cooperation with Azerbaijan.

The ambassador went on to say that for a long time Europe has been the largest trade partner for Azerbaijan in many areas.

“We are also the main investor, we want to develop cooperation, see more tourists from Azerbaijan in Europe and vice versa,” she said. “We hope to be the strongest investment partner in the future as well.”

Deputy Economy Minister Sahil Babayev, for his part, said the EU allocated about 563 million euros to Azerbaijan from 1992 until today.

Twinning projects are the most successful among those, realization of which were possible through these funds, he said.

Twinning projects bring together public sector expertise from EU Member States and beneficiary countries with the aim of achieving concrete mandatory operational results through peer to peer activities.

“24 such projects have successfully been implemented in Azerbaijan; nine projects are in progress and 10 projects are in preparation stage,” he added.

He further added that relations between the EU and Azerbaijan cover a wide range of areas.

“The EU is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan. Almost half of Azerbaijan’s trade turnover accounts for the EU countries. Furthermore, over 45 percent of investments, which were invested in Azerbaijan’s economy over 10 years, also accounts for the EU countries,” the deputy minister added.

EU allocates 1.2M euros to Azerbaijani statistics system

The EU allocated 1.2 million euros to improve the Azerbaijani national statistics system, said Tahir Budagov, Chairman of the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee.

The two-year project includes five components, namely, improvement of statistics data governance and dissemination of statistics information through the geographic information system, as well as statistics data on the population’s income and living conditions, disability and tourism, he explained.

He said the Committee employees intend to visit a number of EU countries to learn from the European experience in the statistics data preparation.

The main partners of the project are the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria. Moreover, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Croatia will support the project.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’ staff journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

Follow us on Twitter: @AzerNewsAz

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