Fourth Annual ESDS International Conference

The 1st December 2008 saw the fourth ESDS International Annual Conference take place at the Institute of Materials in London. Themed on the changing world, the conference offered users and producers of international data an ideal opportunity to meet and share experience, best practice and new developments in the international data world. Once again the conference was fully booked with delegates from the academic research and library communities, the Houses of Parliament, the UK’s National Centre for Social Research and intergovernmental agencies, which included the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-orporation and Development, International Monetary Fund, International Labour Organisation and the International Energy Agency.  

Keith Cole, Director of Mimas and Head of ESDS International opened the conference with a presentation on the role of the ESDS International data service within the UK’s burgeoning international data community. He highlighted how, through the provision of a common user interface, specialist helpdesk, comprehensive supporting documentation, national licensing agreements and a responsive outreach and training programme the service adds value to the aggregate and survey data provided freely to UK academics. Focusing on the data quality checking work undertaken by ESDS International, he illustrated his talk with examples of interesting errors that the service had uncovered and reported back to the data producers over the years.

As the first speaker in the Data Provider session Joachim Doll from the OECD took the conference as an opportunity to demonstrate the OECD’s new look statistics portal ‘OECD.stat’, a new data delivery system which provides improved access to the OECD data resources. Next up, Valentina Kalk from the World Bank introduced the newly available African Development Indicators, a comprehensive database of over 450 indicators for 53 African countries and 5 regional country groups covering the period from 1965 to 2006. Valentina illustrated her talk with some startling facts about Africa, for example that South Africa and Nigeria between them account for 56% of sub-Saharan GDP and that the country with the highest GDP per capita in the region is Equatorial Guinea.  

With two of every ten workers worldwide currently earning less than $1.25 a day,  Jeff Johnson of the International Labour Organisation then took to the floor with a topical presentation on the addition to the Millennium Development Goals of a new ‘Target 1B Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people’. No single labour market indicator exists today that meets the specific requirements of this target, so Jeff outlined how four new indicators, measuring the share of the working poor, vulnerable employment, labour productivity and employment-to-population ratios, will quantify progress towards the new goal.

Alison Park from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) then spoke about cross-national attitudinal research comparing and contrasting two highly regarded survey datasets the International Social Survey Programme and the European Social Survey.

The final presentation in the morning session was given by Michel Francoeur of International Energy Agency, who discussed 'Energy Statistics as a foundation to Energy Indicators'.  Michel highlighted the importance of sound energy statistics and energy balances as a foundation to understanding the energy market and formulating policy analysis and objectives, concluding his talk with a quote from Lord Kelvin – ‘If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it’.

A lively data providers' panel discussion then followed chaired by Professor Denise Lievesley, President of the International Statistical Institute with questions from the audience on topics such as the quality of metadata accompanying datasets and the comparability of data across IGOs and other data providers. Denise also used the session as an opportunity to encourage users of international data to submit papers for consideration at the 57th Session of the International Statistical Institute which is due to take place in Durban, South Africa on 16th-22nd August 2009.  

The poster session over lunch was devoted to academic research with users of the ESDS International data service given the opportunity to showcase their work using international data. Topics included, ‘Mick Jagger's Arithmetics: Can I get satisfaction from satisfactions? What we can learn from subjective satisfactions for well-being design.’, ‘Migrant Flows in a Changing World: what can we learn from the UK?’, ‘Is Generalized Trust Influenced by Occupation of Respondent?’ and ‘Financial Liberalization and Economic Growth: Do Prudential Regulation and Supervision matter?’.  A late, but welcome addition to the lunchtime slot was a talk given by Yutong Li from the International Monetary Fund about developments and progress on data communication which covered the current data environment, salient macro-economic statistics and the recent financial crises and the IMF’s future dataset dissemination strategy.

After lunch the International Data Academic Research session chaired by Tanvi Desai, Data Manager at the London School of Economics began with a presentation by Dr William Hall from Coventry University who spoke about ‘Using International Energy Agency Data to Calculate the Environmental Impact of Connecting Maritime Ships to Shoreside Power. This was followed by Dr Alexander Mihailov from the University of Reading who presented  his work on ‘ Intergenerational Transmission of Inflation Aversion: Theory and Evidence’.  Viet Hoang Nguyen from Leeds University Business School then explained his research on ‘Empirical Investigation of Monetary Models of GBP/USD Exchange Rate in Cointegrating VAR framework with Exogenous I(1) and Structural Break’.  This session ended with a very interesting piece of research from Christian Helmers of the University of Oxford and Manasa Patnam of the University of Cambridge who, using evidence from India, discussed the ‘Formation and Evolution of Childhood Skill Acquisition’.

Following a short break, the delegates reassembled for the final session of the conference which began with Ed Beale and Ian Townsend from the House of Commons Library providing an insight into the work of researchers at the House of Commons Library.  They described the Library’s role as a research and information service for MPs and the public using a case study of Kenya to illustrate how researchers use macro-economic data to create a socio-economic profile of a country.

The day concluded with an ESDS International data surgery session during which Celia Russell and Jack Kneeshaw gave a short presentation on accessing both the macro and micro data and took questions from the audience.

The conference was enjoyed by all with animated discussions throughout the day. Comments following the event included:

• Enjoyed the conference.
• A very effectively organized event!
• Very useful event indeed.
• I like the data provider session the most. It was very informative and resourceful.
• The variety of presentations was excellent – applicable to a wide range of backgrounds.
• Keep up the great work!

Slides, abstracts, audio and video clips are available at www.esds.ac.uk/international/news/conf2008.asp.
Further information about all ESDS International’s previous annual conferences including reports, programmes and conference proceedings can be found at www.esds.ac.uk/international/news/conf.asp.

The 2009 ESDS International Annual Conference will be held on Monday 30th November at the Institute of Materials in London.