A Regional Workshop on “Compilation of Quarterly Accounts (QNA) for ECO Member States is to be held in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran from 8 to 11 March 2015 in collaboration with the Statistical Centre of Iran(SCI), ECO Secretariat and United Nations Statistics Division(UNSD).
The Workshop will be opened by opening message from Dr.  Adel Azar, Head of the SCI in Statistical Research and Training Centre (SRTC) on 8 March 2015 at 9:00 a.m. and the opening ceremony will be attended by Deputy Secretary General of ECO, related Deputy Head of the SCI, Director Generals of the SCI, representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Management and Planning Organization as well as the Workshop participants.
 The Workshop introduces the benefits of compiling quarterly national accounts (QNA) for short-term economic monitoring and planning. An overview of the scope, role, purposes and benefits of compiling QNA will be presented and strategic issues in the compilation of QNA will be highlighted where appropriate.
The process of identifying and assessing common data sources for compiling QNA with a particular focus on production-based and expenditure-based gross domestic product (GDP) and the solutions to overcome the situations where the available data do not meet the requirements of the System of National Accounts (SNA) will be discussed. The objectives of benchmarking  will be introduced and the most common benchmarking techniques to derive QNA estimates which are consistent with annual national accounts (ANA) estimates and to avoid pitfalls such as the “step problem “will be reviewed.
The underlying theory of seasonal adjustment and the most common models and methods used for undertaking seasonal adjustment are also introduced. Other issues for example, whether to seasonally adjust major aggregates directly or indirectly and whether to publish trend cycle estimates in addition to seasonally adjusted estimates will be discussed.
Issues for compiling price and volume measures that are of specific importance to QNA are presented. These include how to aggregate price and volume measures over time, how to choose the base year in the QNA, the frequency of chain-linking, and the techniques for annual chain-linking of quarterly data. The presentation will also discuss how to address the issue of non-additivity. The causes of revisions to the QNA, the nature of the revision process and the essential features of a well-designed and carefully managed revision and dissemination policy, including predictability and openness, advance notice of causes and effects, and explanation, as well as easy access to sufficiently long time series of revised data will be presented and discussed.
It is necessary to mention that 24 participants from 6 ECO member states including Azerbaijan, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Iran, as well as from Research Centre of the Iranian Parliament and ECO Secretariat are to participate in the Workshop