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- His background
paper for the Istanbul World Forum
- Presentation at
the International Exhibition on Innovation Tools
to Transform Information into Knowledge, Gapminder stand
- Discussion
contribution to the Roundtable: Measuring Progress: Making Progress
- Agenda
of the World Forum
- Istanbul
Declaration
Conference delegates have submitted on the OECD World Forum MEASURING
AND FOSTERING THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETIES web page their background
papers which will be of interest to all attending the conference.
- Pavle Sicherl, Professor, SICENTER and University of Ljubljana - Indicator Presentation - The Time Distance. [ TEXT ]
His discussion at
the Roundtable: Measuring Progress: Making
Progress
Thank you. My name is Pavle
Sicherl from SICENTER and the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
When we look at our chain of
reasoning Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, I think that it is very
important that besides discussing problems with data we should also
try to do our best to use statistical measures that would make data
better understandable. This could contribute to enhanced communication
between different actors, such as government, media and those groups
which we are really trying to affect with different actions.
I will illustrate this point
with an example on MDGs. I think that the first step to describe and
to measure a situation is to display more dimensions of it. We need
innovative perspectives also in technical terms, not only in qualitative,
ethical and other dimensions. For Millennium Development Goals we know
that for some countries data permit only qualitative assessment. However,
for those countries and for those indicators for which we do have quantitative
data, we can display them in a new additional way that is very understandable
to everybody. That is, we can measure the deviation of the actual implementation
from the line to the MDG target also in the time dimension. What does
it mean? If we are, for instance, 2 percent below the line to target,
we may also say that the actual implementation is 2 years behind the
line to target. Moreover, I will mention the results for the aggregate
of Developing Regions. For instance, the first poverty indicator measured
by population below $1 PPP per day shows that it is 3 years ahead of
the line to target 2015. This is an example of a favourable result and
I think that we should not underrate this attainment. On the other hand,
if we are looking at the health indicators, the results for 2004 show
that we are 5 to 7 years behind the line to target. And everybody will
understand this additional dimension of monitoring.
Without going further into
details, I would recommend that at the national and sub-national level
as well as in international organizations we do search for the proper
data first, but we also have to look for innovative measures to better
present data in an understandable way to the actors of decision-making.
I will finish with another
suggestion: why not using this method of monitoring also for aid disbursements?
As donors play an important role in the success of the implementation
of the MDGs, the degree of implementation of their disbursements in
relation to their targets could also be usefully expressed in the time
dimension.
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