Mois : mai 2018

MEDSTAT IV is supporting the MED countries in developing new and innovative dissemination tools that are more relevant for communicating through the social media

 

All the MED countries are confronted with a rapid evolution of the way users are considering and “consuming” statistics. In particular, the development of the social media has put additional stress on the Statistics Offices who have to radically adjust their communication and dissemination practices to a rapidly changing environment. There is a general sense that data must be made more attractive, by using animation, and more easily accessible to all users, by going through on line products.

 

These adjustments require resources that are not often available in the statistical offices, particularly in a time of budget restriction. The development of data visualisation products also requires technical capacities, such as the ones of designers and of communication experts, which are rare assets in statistical offices.

The participants in a recent regional workshop organised by MEDSTAT IV (Lisbon – February 21-22, 2018) concluded that there was a good case to make for a regional pooling of resources, for sharing investment and for exchanging experiences in this area. They asked MEDSTAT IV to initiate a regional exercise with the aim of assisting the development of country experiences with data visualisation, sharing the results of these experiences within the region as to draw lessons and potentially replicate the best practices.

Five countries (Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia) have already set-up national teams composed with several capacities that need to be pooled in order to design data visualisation for statistics: statisticians, economists, designers, IT specialists, communication specialists. They defined the products (infographics, animated graphs and tables, videos …) that they wanted to develop around a theme (Inflation, Disability, gender gap …) a message (how the price index is calculated, what difficulties faced by disabled children for accessing education, Domestic violence against women …) and sets of data.

MEDSTAT IV will accompany the national team in their project and will provide technical assistance when and where necessary. The various experiences will be shared and discussed at the occasion of a regional workshop that will take place early 2019. From this exchange, lessons will be drawn and good practices will be identified that will contribute to increasing the knowledge in the region on data visualisation.

 

To know more, please contact MEDSTAT4@MEDSTAT4.fr

 

One of the main problem facing statisticians in the MED is to be isolated from the development of international methodologies and norms as well as from international fora where innovations and new techniques are discussed. Very often, this is the result of budgetary restrictions. But, more important is the fact the voice of the region is not heard enough in international statistics this generating doubts on the quality and relevance of the work that is done there.

In 2017, MEDSTAT IV mobilised 14 MED statisticians to prepare and deliver presentations at the Conference of the International Statistics Institute (ISI) that took place in Marrakech on July 16-20. The ISI is a major association of statisticians who gathered more than 2000 specialists on various topics. The MED participants focused on 4 main issues of importance for the region: Transport statistics, Migration statistics, Gender statistics and business registers. The sessions were well attended and they all generated a fruitful discussion among the statisticians present. All the participants and the Directors of the NSIs of the MED countries praised this initiative and recommended that it should be replicated for other international fora.

In 2018, the project will thus und the participation of MED statisticians to two major events in the sector.

In September 19-21, the IAOS will convey its bi-annual Conference on the issue of “Better Statistics for Better Lives”. The MED countries will present several papers related to the “Communication for statistics” training course that was developed by MEDSTAT IV in a specific session entitled “how to talk statistics to journalist”. The session will be chaired by Eurostat and there will be presentations by two journalists and one statisticians who participated in the course, as trainers and trainees.

In October 22-24, the UNWDF will take place in Dubai and all the Directors General from the Statistical Offices of the MED countries will attend. There will be a specific session organised around presentations by the MED countries under the theme of “trust in statistics”. Presentations will be made by Egypt, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia.

 

For more information, please contact MEDSTAT4@MEDSTAT4.fr or consult the web-sites of the 2 events at:

IAOS: http://www.oecd.org/iaos2018/

UNWDF: https://undataforum.org/

Written by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS)

Continued completing the course of MEDSTAT on C4S (Communication for Statistics), ICBS began the process of building a new course. The purpose of the course is to improve communication between information producers on subjects of wages and employment data on one hand and journalists covering these subjects on the other hand.

The course is scheduled to begin in early October 2018. The course program was approved by Sandrine Beaujean (MEDSTAT Lead Expert for Training) and Thierry Paccoud (MEDSTAT Team Leader) according to the subjects studied in the C4S course. The course program deals mainly with:

1.      Rewriting the press releases on wages and employment data. This will be done by Professional support of an expert in the Hebrew language.

2.      Presentation to the journalists of main subjects of wages and employment data.

3.      Presentation to the journalists on using Excel and how to use it to calculate basic calculations like median, average wages etc.

4.      Open discussion between the journalists and the Producers

5.      External lectures We expect that as a result of this course press releases published by ICBS on subjects of wages and employment data will be more clearly and understandable to the journalists.

PUBLICATIONS OF MEDSTAT IV – 2018

Business registers and demography of enterprises in the ENP-South countries

How business registers are built and updated in Egypt? In Algeria? How many businesses are in Morocco? In Jordan? In which sectors of activities do you find most of the businesses?

These are the kind of questions that are answered in this new publication from the business register and statistics sector of MEDSTAT IV. During several months, the ENP-S countries worked together at exchanging and discussing the details of the elaboration and updating of their respective business registers. The cross-checking of files from different sources, administrative and survey ones, the periodicity of the reviews and updating as well as the classifications were among the main topics debated. The project gathered this information from the countries and presents them in the harmonised tables that constitute the first section of the publication. The countries also provided the project with their latest data on enterprises extracted from their respective registers. Methodological information concerning the latest update and other characteristics have been added in order to ease the comparison among the countries. This is the first time that these data are released for the whole region.

To access to the document, please click here:

MEDSTAT IV_BUSINESS REGISTER STATISTICS_2018_EN

 

Compendium of the labour force and employment surveys in the ENP-South countries

The Compendium of the LFSs of ENP-South countries has been prepared by a pool of five experts including the Lead Coordinator for the sector from Tunisia, the sector National Coordinator from Lebanon, the project’s Key Expert and two senior Short Term Experts, with the active collaboration of experts of all other countries participating in the sector Working Group on Labour market statistics. The preparation of the compendium built on the results of the sector reviews recently made in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Tunisia as well as on other material provided by the countries. The initial draft of the publication, including a series of summary tables and the drafting of a preliminary version of a synthesis document, was reviewed by the Working Group members.

The publication reviews and discusses the details of the labour force and employment surveys in the ENP-South countries and of their implementation, this giving a comparable regional picture of the achievements in this very sensitive area. The work done by the countries will help to explore the feasibility of more harmonisation between the national surveys, in general terms and with respect to the introduction of rotating ad hoc modules, as it successfully occurs in the experience of the EU LFS.

To access to the document, please click here:

 

MEDSTAT_COMPENDIUM_2018_EN

MEDSTAT_COMPENDIUM_2018_FR

Better capturing the flows of sea transport and the traffic over the Mediterranean Sea requires reliable geo-referenced maritime transport statistics

Palermo, Astoria Palace Hotel, 8-10 May 2018

If statistics on ships calling, on passengers embarking or disembarking and on the volume of goods loaded and unloaded at a specific port are key to capturing the activity of a specific port, they do not tell much about the traffic of passengers and goods transported by sea. In order to understand these flows, it is necessary to have data on the origins and destinations of the ships, of the passengers and goods embarked. This is the subject dealt with geo-referenced maritime transport statistics.

These statistics also have the advantage of allowing a direct comparison of the statistics produced by two partner ports, that is, ports mutually declared as origins and destinations of these flows of traffic and transport. Such systematic comparisons are the subject of mirror exercises from which a lot can be learnt regarding the quality of the data produced.

In this context, the regional workshop organised by MEDSTAT IV will allow to take stock of the maritime transport statistics produced by all partner countries and to implement such mirror exercises between the geo-referenced statistics produced by their main ports. These exercises should allow not only to measure the gaps highlighted by the mirror statistics but also to identify possible sources for these gaps, to adjust the methods, systems and tools implemented within these ports and to improve the quality of these statistics.

Experts from the ENP-S countries statistics offices, Ministries of transport and port authorities have been invited to the workshop. They will debate on these issues and will try to identify the best practices.