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Enrico Giovannini
Enrico Giovannini
Chief Statistician of the OECD
Statistics are a fundamental input for individual and collective decisions, both at national and at international levels. Over the last decade, there has been an increasing interest to complement policy documents and decisions with statistical information (for example, describing past and current tendencies in the economy, the society, etc.) and to set quantitative targets for the policy itself. This attitude has obliged statisticians to face new challenges and develop new concepts and new statistical data sets in order to meet policy needs. In addition, media and the civil society are also demanding more information to assess current trends and evaluate results of various policies. In the context of today’s “Information Society” an abundance of data is readily available (in the press, on the Internet, etc.). New data providers now play a role in the “market of information” and compete daily with official sources to capture the attention of media, businesses, households and individuals. In some cases, this competition is based on serious efforts to produce data not available elsewhere, but in other cases surveys carried out by private institutes on few individual and/or econometric estimates are presented, and commented on, as indisputable “facts”. Both national and international/supranational statistical organisations face such challenge. Academic and research institutions, private companies and NGOs publish international comparative studies quoting both official sources and statistics obtained by conducting direct surveys and/or merging data produced by unofficial sources. Therefore, all international organisations are asked to increase their efforts to improve the comparability of statistics produced at national level, and develop guidelines and recommendations to measure new phenomena. International comparability is more and more an issue of concern for all countries. In fact, the international dimension of problems and policies, the development of benchmarking techniques to compare the relative position of each country with other countries with similar degrees of development, and the surveillance mechanisms developed by the international community require comparable statistics. At the same time, individual businesses, not only multinationals, need good quality statistics to evaluate and compare the dynamics of actual and potential markets, domestic and international prices, etc. The OECD is fully committed to contribute to this effort, and to co-operate with other international organisations, not only to produce high quality statistics for member countries, but also to cooperate with non-member countries to enhance statistical capacity and to improve international comparability of data. While the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (and related indicators) provide a framework for evaluating the progress of developing countries, there exists no co-ordinated worldwide effort to study the development and implications of these large-scale systems of public information for developed countries. Therefore, the OECD has decided to act as a catalyst to convene and promote research and information sharing among countries, allowing them to compare strategies intended to measure and assess the overall “position” and “progress” of a certain political entity (country, region, etc.) vis-à-vis other similar entities. The OECD has a long tradition in developing sets of statistics and indicators on several subject matter areas (economic trends, education, health, environment, competitiveness, etc.) and a high reputation both for the quality of its analytical work and for the statistics that underpin that work. In some areas, OECD’s statistics are internationally recognised as the “best” in terms of coverage, timeliness, and comparability. The network of national and international experts created through OECD Committees and Working Parties gives the Organisation the possibility to launch research activities and data collections on new topics, playing a leading role in producing new statistics and developing new definitions, classifications and standards. To face emerging statistical challenges, the Organisation launched a Statistics Strategy at the beginning of 2001. Since then, several initiatives have been undertaken to raise the profile of statistics vis-à-vis OECD stakeholders and top managers and to improve the quality of OECD statistics and the efficiency of statistical processes. A proof of the OECD commitment to produce relevant, reliable, timely and comparable statistics is the recent creation of the “Committee on Statistics”. The new Committee will play a crucial role in improving both the overall quality of OECD statistics and the dialogue between statisticians and policy makers who participate in other OECD Committees, reinforcing the key role of the Organisation in the world of international statistics. The Forum “Statistics, Knowledge and Policy” represents a milestone in the OECD Statistics Strategy: the Forum will allow statisticians, policy makers, academics and representatives of various components of the society to discuss the development of institutional frameworks and technical initiatives to identify and calculate key indicators for assessing the situation of a country (a region, a local community) from the economic, social and environmental points of view, learning from other countries’ experiences and relying on the support of the OECD. The participation of such a qualified group of people to the Forum represents by itself a confirmation of the importance of the topic.
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