| Pavle Sicherl at OECD conference Data Designed for Decisions |
| Thursday, 18 June 2009 | |
Time distance offers a novel perception of world disparities and of the implementation of the Millennium Development GoalsThis is the presentation of Pavle Sicherl at the joint OECD and Institute for International Design conference, June 18-20, Paris.In the ‘Beyond GDP’ chain Statistics-Knowledge-Policy we need new concepts and indicators, but also new understandable statistical measures facilitating very diverse groups of stakeholders to build their perceptions of the situation. S-time-distance is such a novel statistical measure providing new insights to many problems. Expressed in time units it is readily understood by policy makers, managers, media and general public, thus an excellent presentation and communication tool for policy analysis and debate. S-time-distance measures the distance between the points in time (lead or lag in time) when the two compared countries reach the same level of the indicator X. In measuring the overall “position” and “progress” among and within countries the new dimension succeeds in finding new stories about development gaps from existing data. It complements prevailing static measures by telling new more complex stories in simple terms. The new story of this added dimension of the disparity in the world is found by showing how many years earlier were the present values for 160-200 countries attained in Sweden as a long-term benchmark. For GDP per capita one half of the countries (80 countries) were lagging Sweden by more than 70 years (36 countries even for more than 160 years). Yet for internet users per 100 inhabitants the corresponding value was 10 years, even though the static disparities were high. The perceptions of the degree of disparity may be very different in static terms and in time distance pointing to broader conclusions and semantics important for policy considerations. Cross-fertilization: Gaptimer meets Gapminder. Time gap measure animation example is provided in the Gapminder Community graph. Application to monitoring implementation of targets with time distance is shown for Millennium Development Goals. Free web monitoring tool is available for users at the world, country, regional and local levels. The presentation is available at Sicherl presentation DD4D ver 2.ppt |