ISI - International Statistical Institute
ISI Newsletter Volume 26 no. 3 (78) 2002

International Association for Official Statistics

		Editorial Address	Irena Krizman, Vice- President IAOS, Vozarski pot 12, P.O.B. 3570, 1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia tel.: +386 1 2415 302 – fax: +386 1 2415 344 – E-mail: irena.krizman@gov.si
		President	Paul Cheung, Department of Statistics, 100 High Street, The Treasury #05-01, 179434 Singapore Tel: +65 3327686 – Fax: +65-3327689 – E-mail: Paul_Cheung@singstat.gov.sg
		Website	http://tilastokeskus.fi/iaos

Report on IAOS EXCO Meeting London, 28 September 2002

The Executive Committee of IAOS met in London on 28th September 2002.

We would like to highlight the following issues to IAOS members:

IAOS /IASS Conference 2004 Abidjan

The IAOS Conference Abidjan 2004 is being organised jointly with IASS and is scheduled to be held in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, from 26-28 July 2004. The theme of the Conference is Poverty, Social Exclusion and Development. It will be under the patronage of the Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire, and hosted by the Côte d'Ivoire National Statistical Office, the School of Economic Analysis and Statistics (ENSAE) and the Côte d'Ivoire Association of Statisticians and Demographers.

Mr. Alain Azouvi, former Head of the division for programmes of co-operation at INSEE and ISI representative to the Consortium PARIS 21, chairs the Programme Committee. Please see attached report for more details. Ideas and suggestions for the programme are most welcome.

IAOS Conference, London 2002

The IAOS held its biennial Conference in London from 27-29 August 2002. It was hosted by the UK Office for National Statistics, and attended by more than 300 participants. The Executive Committee would like to place on record our deep gratitude to ONS for the efforts they put in to make this conference a world-class event.

ISI Conference, Berlin, 13-20 August 2003 

Ten Invited Paper meetings of the 2003 ISI Session in Berlin will be organised by IAOS. The preparatory work is well under way under the Programme Committee Chair, Siu-Ming Tam. SCORUS is organising a satellite meeting in Potsdam (21-23 August 2003) following the ISI Berlin session, jointly the German Statistical Society and the Union of German Municipal Statisticians. The meeting is intended to provide a platform for the development and promotion of standards for comparative urban and regional statistics.

ISI Conference Sydney, 2005

For the 2005 ISI Session in Sydney, Frederick W.H. Ho, Commissioner, Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong, China, will be the IAOS Programme Committee Chair. A proposal for an IAOS satellite meeting in New Zealand was considered. Further discussion will be held with Statistics New Zealand on this.

IAOS Conference 2006 Amman

Tentative contacts have been made for the 2006 IAOS Conference to be held in Amman, Jordan. Further discussions will take place.

Standing Committee on Regional and Urban Statistics (SCORUS)

The Executive Committee considered a paper put up by SCORUS requesting for support in its effort to expand its membership and to reach out to professional groups interested in city and regional statistics. The Executive agreed with the aims of the paper and urged SCORUS to expand its membership base.

Financial support would be made available to SCORUS for membership expansion and other promotional activities. Mr. Farhad Mehran was asked to facilitate the communications between IAOS and SCORUS.

Nomination Committee.
Mr. Willem de Vries (Deputy Director UNSD) was appointed as Chair of the Nomination Committee for the new members of Executive Committee for the period 2003-2005.

Awards

• Best paper award. The IAOS will invite papers on a given theme from young official statisticians. Writers of the best papers will be invited at IAOS expense to participate at the ISI session and present the paper at the meeting. See details in a separate report elsewhere in this Newsletter.
• NSO young statistician awards. As a way of promoting IAOS's relationship with national statistical offices, the Executive Committee discussed the modalities of awarding every two years travel grants to 5 young, promising statisticians working at national statistical offices in developing regions of the world for the purpose of attending the ISI Session or IAOS Conference. No decision was reached.

Website

• IAOS has now an active website maintained by the Singapore Statistical Office. It displays among other things an attractive and friendly membership application form.

The International Association for Official Statistics conference on 'Official Statistics and the New Economy', was hosted by the UK Office for National Statistics from 27 - 29 August 2002.

By the time the conference ended, some 340 delegates had been involved in presentations, panel sessions and discussions with a good number of the economists and statisticians who lead the world thinking in this area. The conference was a great success, in both the quality of the programme, and the organisation of each day. All of the hospitality events ended up being first class, and reinforced the general goodwill of the conference.

Many delegates commented that this was one of the best organised, and relevant in content, that they had ever attended.

The programme committee was chaired by Tim Holt, who managed to bring in leading contributors from North America and Europe, and from as far as the Antipodes. The conference organisation was planned by Wesley Woollard, ONS Human Resources Division, Leah Pybus, ONS Private Office, Amanda Charles, ONS International Division, James O'Leary, ONS National Statistics and Policy Division and the ONS Communications Division team led by Louise Davies and Caroline Lewis.

There was an excellent mix of delegates, many from the United States, and strong contingents from Asia and Africa. After the conference, both ONS and the UK Department for International Development organised workshops on 'leadership in statistics' and in 'capacity building' for senior statistical office staff, involving some 60 of the delegates.

Len Cook, U.K. National Statistician, and proud host, commented that "the conference is the sort of international event that an office of ONS' size might run once a decade. The success of this conference is a strong testament to the competence, get up and go and energy of ONS staff, and is a great step in affirming ONS' place as a world class statistical office."

For more information about the Conference including programme, papers, and photographs, please refer to the conference website www.statistics.gov.uk/iaoslondon2002/ 

A session in progress

Len thanking Tim for his support and 
presenting him with the purple conference polo shirt

Ian Maclean doing the Highland Fling 
with Leah Pybus at the Reception

Wesley Woollard with two of the younger delegates 
during the Reception!

Xavier Charoy reports:

IASS/IAOS Joint Conference in 2004 (Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire)

The preparation of this important Conference has entered an active phase. A meeting took place on August 27, 2002, in London, to launch the work of the Programme Committee. Paul Cheung, IAOS President, Luigi Biggeri, IASS President-elect, representing President Xavier Charoy, Alain Azouvi, chairman of the Programme Committee, Jean-Louis Bodin, past ISI President and adviser of the local Organizing Committee and a few others decided on the broad lines of the Conference and the time table for its organization.

Alain Azouvi then started working with the Programme Committee in order to set up the themes of the meetings within the Conference. The other members of the Programme Committee are the following : Carmen Feijo (Brazil), Naman Keita (FAO), Koffi Nguessan (Côte d'Ivoire), Zarylbek Kudabaev (Kyrgyzstan), Achille Lemmi (Italy). We expect a few others will join soon.

23rd Conference on Regional and Urban Statistics and Research  on "Statistics for the Cities of Tomorrow''  was organized in Lisbon Portugal, 11-15 June 2002 by the National Statistical Institute of Portugal (INE).

The conference was delivered successfully. It was opened by the Secretary of State for Environment Mr. Jose Martins with Dr. Paulo Gomes Director, INE and welcomed by the Chairperson of SCORUS. The keynote speech of the Executive Director of UN-HABITAT was delivered by Mr. M. Hundsalz on her behalf. 

There were more than 100 Statisticians from all over the world including those from UN, EUROSTAT, OECD, many national and international organizations, City Statisticians Government Departments, Universities, research institutions etc. The SCORUS Conference in Lisbon had several very good academic papers, which are being published in the proceedings of the conference, and a CD-ROM will be developed. 

The Committee Meeting of SCORUS on 11 June 2002 in INE, Portugal deliberated on various issues including strengthening the SCORUS through its activities and working closely with the IAOS. The current Committee tenure is up to the Berlin Session in august 2003. The next meeting of the Committee will take place in Berlin during the ISI session. SCORUS will address the following major issues in its future activities, Poverty, Homelessness, Slum Statistics, Terrorism Statistics, Urban crime, Urban Violence, HIV/AIDS, Street Children and of course Comparative City Statistics. The SCORUS journal "Cities and Regions" will be published regularly and it will be made a high quality scientific journal. 

The next SCORUS Conference will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA, 19 - 21 May 2004

We had a very successful meeting in London with the Executive of IAOS. SCORUS business plan was discussed and it was agreed to explore the possibilities to upgrade the SCORUS as an independent section of ISI. SCORUS has been provided funds for membership activities and its publicity for attracting more members. SCORUS will plan its activities for building a network of urban and regional statisticians, researchers and planners soon.

Next event of SCORUS is in Berlin 2003 where two invited paper sessions will be organized by SCORUS. The two invited paper sessions on Impact of Migration on Urban Areas and Intra-city Differentials and Its Measurement Issues will be organized by Mr. Klaus Trutzel (kum.trutzel@t-online.de) and Mr. Markandey Rai (Markandey.Rai@unhabitat.org) respectively. Preparations for organizing these two sessions are progressing very well. The speakers and the discussants have been identified and reported to the Programme Committee. 

SCORUS under the umbrella of the International Statistical Institute - is organising a satellite conference in Potsdam, Germany, neighbouring city of Berlin 21 - 23 August 2003, where the 54^th ISI Conference is taking place. This conference will be the starting point for an international network for urban and regional statistics to establish continual work on methods and indicators in this field. The satellite conference in Potsdam is focussing on: 

Standards for Regional and Urban Indicators

It will be combined and jointly organised with the German Statistical Week, the traditional conference of the Union of German Municipal Statisticians and the German Statistical Society incorporating also the German Society for Demography.

The SCORUS Satellite Conference will start with a joint opening session including also the participants of the national conference focussing on Europe and looking at it from the global, the national, the regional and the urban point of view. The problems of social coherence in cities and regions, with special attention to the integration of migrants will be discussed in four workshops: 

• measuring coherence of the resident population 

• supply oriented aspects of integration policies

• territorial reference of comparative measures of coherence

• Definitions, descriptions and methods: metadata for regional and urban indicators.

The Local Organising Committee is chaired by Reiner Pokorny, City of Potsdam. Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee is Markandey Rai, UN Habitat, and Nairobi, Kenya. Inquiries about the conference can be addressed to Klaus Trutzel, Nuremberg, Germany (e-mail: kum.trutzel@t-online.de).

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