Statistics Canada's Project

14.133.        Statistics Canada is undertaking a five-year project on 'Global Production Statistics' to develop, and produce statistics that better capture the global activities of national enterprises and to meet new international standards. Objectives of the project are to identify enterprises involved in manufacturing services on physical inputs owned by others and merchanting and measure this activity, and better understand factoryless goods production activities.

14.134.        The project has three stages:

  • Research - investigate new data sources; test feasibility of new questionnaires or in adding new fields to current questionnaires; investigate in-depth the full customs' database.
  • Results from research - update the business frame to track and identify enterprises involved in the activities; implement questionnaire updates; begin provisional data collection, estimates and analysis.
  • Implementation - integrate new data into the Macro Economic Accounts.

14.135.        Initial feedback from stage 1 indicates that:

  • Respondents need knowledge of their business production arrangements to be able to complete the questionnaires
  • There do not appear to be any easy cases where all inputs are provided by the foreign client and all finished products are exported back to the client
  • No cases of pure factoryless goods producing activities were found
  • Tracking merchandise transactions (inward and outward) will be a great challenge

14.136.        The investigation of the customs database revealed two Customs' programmes that will enable better tracking of inward and outward processing activities. These are:

  • Exporter of Processing Services program (EOPS)
    • Allows the tax-free importation of goods by a Canadian processor for the purpose of processing the goods in Canada and subsequent export
  • Canadian Goods Abroad Program (CGAP)
    • Full or partial relief of the duties and taxes, including the value-added taxes, for goods that have been repaired, altered, or worked on outside Canada

 

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