​​ The Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics (MDPS) organized a workshop on "Statistical Business Register" for the period 3–5 November 2015, in collaboration with the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (Ankara), and the Malaysian Department of Statistics, in the presence of a number of governmental agencies representatives involved in economic activities registers in the State of Qatar .The training workshop - held in the ministry's premises – gave a presentation on the most important best practices in the development of economic statistics, building  the business register, identifying the challenges and issues in the area of preparing and analyzing trade and industry statistics. Moreover, it provided an opportunity to the exchange experiences on dealing with the challenges and issues in the development, maintenance and use of statistical business registers to produce economic statistics with less time and effort.The workshop aimed to recognize the importance of the Statistical Business Register for economic statistics, identify its content and define the steps to build and maintain the Business Register. The Business Register is the central repository of information that maintains a complete, up to date and unduplicated list on all active businesses in the country. The Business Register's role is to provide MDPS with a comprehensive quality frame in terms of coverage and a set of stratification variables such as industrial classification, revenue, number of employees and total assets. The business register will help improve the efficiency of the national statistical system, which should in turn help to reduce the response burden on businesses. It would open up possibilities of electronic data interchange (EDI) for statistical work, such as the transfer of large amounts of data on a regular basis with beneficiaries and data users.