At the Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union and Republic of Serbia, held on December 10, 2018, the Negotiating Chapter 18 - Statistics was officially opened.

Negotiations under Chapter 18 include harmonization of legal regulations with the EU acquis in the field of statistics. The EU acquis governing the issue of statistics contains a wide range of methodological manuals and guidelines in various statistical domains, such as agriculture, economic and monetary policy, demographic and social statistics and research. International agreements or international standards, as well as statistics code of practice, provide further basis for statistical production.

This chapter is considered important, because the positive changes that result from a successful negotiation process will provide better quality, availability and credibility of the data, which will afterwards lead to appropriate decisions- making for implementation of common EU policy.