SESRTCIC CO-ORGANIZES THE OECD WORLD FORUM’S REGIONAL CONFERENCE FOR ASIA

The SESRTCIC co-organized a joint OECD and Korean National Statistical Office conference for the Asian region on “Measuring and Fostering the Progress of Societies,” convened in Seoul, South Korea on 8-9 February 2007 as one of the regional pre-conferences for the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, which will be held in Istanbul-Turkey on 27-30 June 2007. Delegates from some Asian OIC member states, like Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia and Bangladesh were among the participants in this conference.

The conference started with opening remarks by Dae You Kim, Commissioner of the Korean National Statistics Office (KNSO) and Enrico Giovannini, Chief Statistician of the OECD, followed by a welcome address from Deputy Prime Minister of Korea.

The first session, titled: “Statistics, Knowledge and Policy: Measuring Progress in Reality” was chaired by Dr. Savaş Alpay, who also presented a paper addressing the subject with the title: “Real Progress, Shared Progress.”

The conference highlighted important issues covering the definition of progress from an Asian perspective and how it could be measured. Changing demography with aging population and low fertility rate, globalization and free trade, energy and environment, evaluation of usefulness of international indicator sets to monitor progress with respect to MDG indicators, importance of collaboration between statisticians, policy makers and civil society, improvement of national statistical systems effectiveness and efficiency in developing countries, measuring democracy and human rights were among the issues addressed in this conference.

Conference Web Site

Conference Conclusions