The National Statistics Office (NSO) will release in October this year the 2003 to 2004 monthly volume of production index (VoPI) for selected commodities from the results of the Monthly Survey of Production (MSP). The MSP, now a regular undertaking of NSO, was initially conducted as a joint project with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 2002. This survey aims to meet the growing demand for commodity-based and volume-based production statistics.

Since 1998, the NSO has been conducting the Monthly Integrated Survey of Selected Industries ((MISSI) which covers major sectors of manufacturing. The MISSI generates and disseminates industrial indices derived from value of production data. In addition, the volume of production index (VoPI) is also being generated from MISSI by the indirect method. The MSP intends to improve the methodology in the calculation of the monthly industrial production indices, particularly the volume of production index (VoPI) using the direct approach.

The MSP covers 156 commodities produced by 24 selected manufacturing industries. These 24 industries are the top sectors that accounted for about 75 percent of total value added as taken from the results of the 1997 Annual Survey of Establishments for manufacturing.

The establishments that produce one or more of the 156 target commodities and have average total employment (ATE) that is above the cut-off line established for each sector are selected as samples.

The MSP collects data on volume of production, volume of sales, volume of inventory and value of production for each commodity. The data collected will be used to generate monthly volume indices of production, sales and inventory of commodity by sector and total manufacturing.