Commission Regulation (EC) No 1669/2001 of 20 August 2001 amending Article 3 of Regulation (EC) No 1917/2000 laying down certain provisions for the implementation of Council Regulation (EC) No 1172/95 as regards statistics on external trade (Text with EEA relevance)

Commission Regulation (EC) No 1669/2001
of 20 August 2001
amending Article 3 of Regulation (EC) No 1917/2000 laying down certain provisions for the implementation of Council Regulation (EC) No 1172/95 as regards statistics on external trade
(Text with EEA relevance)
THE COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
,
Having regard to the Treaty establishing the European Community,
Having regard to Council Regulation (EC) No 1172/95 of 22 May 1995 on the statistics relating to the trading of goods by the Community and its Members States with non-member countries(1), as last amended by Regulation (EC) No 374/98(2), and in particular Article 21 thereof,
Whereas:
(1) The use of a threshold for each transaction for external trade statistics may allow appreciable savings in the costs for collecting the information, at the cost of a limited loss of accuracy.
(2) Exhaustive coverage of external trade statistics must be assured, particularly in view of their use at macro economic level for drawing up the national accounts and the balances of payments. The use of a statistical threshold must therefore be compensated for by an estimate of the data below the threshold.
(3) The amount of the statistical threshold was calculated in such a way as to meet fully the objective of savings in the collection costs, while taking account of price trends and respecting the relevance and accuracy of the statistics published in accordance with the Combined Nomenclature.
(4) Other procedures may enable the burden of data collection to be simplified and limited without any effect on quality, for example by using electronic declarations. Application of the statistical threshold must therefore remain optional.
(5) The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the Committee on External Trade Statistics,