Measuring Progress

Global players whose aim was to measure national, regional and local progress gathered in İstanbul, June 27-30, aiming at defining progress, to review where we are heading, and to facilitate access to relevant data, indicators, and tools for knowledge making and further debate on what measures we have missed and where we went wrong. There were remarks on defining Progress, in similar terms as beauty, to be in the eye of beholder (Thornton, R.), in addition to mentioning that no comprehensive understanding and evaluation of factors that cause social and global transformation are available. Certainly, the big message was to stress on the need to include social and environmental indicators to GDP for comprehensive account of development. There was remarks on the fact that everyone is entitled to his opinion but not his facts, if statistics are to have their democratic function.

The aim of statistical capacity building is to improve information exchange to produce reliable and relevant statistics to foster progress and wellfare, replace bureaucratic by democratic budgeting, estimate where we are, and anticipate where we want to go, and avoid duplication, and to build on and learn from the successes and mistakes.

Research and dialogue covers questions impacting on development strategies. Policy dialogue meetings furnished by informed, thought provoking, easily accessed illustrations of the situation, highlights clear account of policy options. İnducting data from research conducted by various stakeholders such as civil society, NGOs, private sector, inter-governmental orgs, and international finance institutions and other research institutions organise an accurate order of priorities around complex situation for decision makers. Fiona Stanley elaborated on demographic challenges and the issue of women's fertility dependency on governmental support. Exclusion of ageing population from involvement in society will worsen health situation. Chris Hoenig from İBM told about his finding when going through the System of National Accounts, that unemployment among bachelors are higher; which is indicative of employer's preference for married staff.

A connected and communicative international statistical network and developing comprehensive indicator system that allows comparrative analysis, placed at the hearth of initiatives to increase accountability and reliability in development planning. İnterest brings bravery of action and that is what is needed to engage people in policy making by informed and easy to access statistics. Ed Spar pointed out that when people dont care, politicians either; therefore vicious cycle of boring data should be replaced by fun and engaging data to engage apathetic people.

'A goal that cannot be monitored cannot be met or missed'. Generating new knowledge, and global public goods through research, technical innovation and sharing lessons learned are pursued by WHO's Health Metric Network. Hence, maternal mortality and pregnancy related deaths was selected as an indicator for monitoring progress toward MDG-5. With clear mesurement strategy WHO initiated to integrate monitoring of health systems into country health information system. Knowledge has instrumental value to improve health and can be internalized by individuals to modify their life style. Lievesley pointed out that we should measure both progress in health care and population and include healthy people in country's health status. She further elaborated that health statistics differ when using Health Adjusted Life Expectancy HALE, compared to LE, which revealed the number of mental disorders triple, and increasing Osteoarthritis cases.

Climate Change increased interests in environmental statistics, energy balances, transport, land use, agriculture, trade statistics, and natural accounts. Climate Change policies are build around improving efficiency of energy use both in fossil fuel and electricity end-use, nuclear power and renewables. The Reference Scenarios (A1,B1,US Dept of Energy, B2, WB, EA, A2), raised question on estimates of global warming and future flood policies. Although, numbers speak for themselves but strong politicai will and urgent governmental action is a must. For changing the situation a united action, using new technologies and stressing on new business actions, of the sort with more responsibility and kinder approach, were mentioned (Bosch, İPCC).

On education, rational of directing educational institution, accountability, and values in education are subject of debates. Kroeger reviewed motivation of public, how they get their information and how they use it, mentioning that ideologies matter, and that people may have clear perception of the minimum wage, and social security issues but have no idea of budget deficit impacts. Hence, knowledge matters for policies that people relate to, and that information does not necessarily lead to more concession and often make people polarized.

For the matter of perception versus reality it is important to be seen as reliable and uncorrupt as well to win people's confidence. Mulgan from The Young Foundation was inpirational in developing new models to meet unmet needs, ranging from Studio Schools which integrate work and learning to new models for managing chronic disease.

İn Conclusion, much is happening at national and international levels for development of statistics such as international household survey network initiated by the World Bank. Relative Purchasing Power of citizens of countries is estimated by an initative of İnternational Comparison Program İCP. The goal is to support poverty measurment and monitoring efforts. World Bank developed a new software İCP Tool Pack to facilitate cross country comparison of products.

Finally the debate on the effectiveness of international aid and following roundtable on Making Progress in its measurement was chaired by Richard Manning and Jeremy Hobbs from Oxfam elaborated on issues raised by NGOs in measuring progress. The project developed a global conversation about what progress means aiming at tackling one of the most important issues of our time: how to improve the nexus between evidence, decision making and public discourse.