Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas Opens Meeting

(20 April 2010) Authorities and experts from 19 countries from the Americas and Europe, members of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) began today analyzing the development of statistics in the region in areas such as censuses, the Millennium Development Goals, gender and poverty measurement, among others.

During the Ninth Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of ECLAC (SCA-ECLAC), participants will review regional and international cooperation programmes on statistics during 2009-2011 and assess the activities of the Working Groups of the Conference.

The meeting of the SCA-ECLAC Executive Committee was inaugurated this morning by Luis Beccaria, Director of the Statistics and Economic Projections Division at ECLAC, in representation of Commission Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena. Also present at the opening was the Director of the National Statistics Bureau of the Dominican Republic, Pablo Tactuk, who presides the Executive Committee.

Beccaria welcomed participants, among them representatives of multilateral organizations and of the United Nations system, and stressed the importance that governments continue providing support to strengthen national statistics systems.

Tactuk highlighted the power of statistics as a tool for development and coincided in the need to strengthen national statistics systems so they are technically independent, impartial and objective.

The Statistical Conference of the Americas is a subsidiary body of the Commission that seeks to promote the development and improvement of national statistics and assure they are internationally comparable. The Conference also promotes international, regional and bilateral cooperation on statistics in the region.

During the meeting, which will conclude on Thursday, April 22, delegates will also review the advances and upcoming goals and tasks of initiatives on international statistical cooperation, such as the 2011 Round of the International Comparison Programme (ICP). The ICP is a global initiative that will gather data on the prices of goods and services of a basket of comparable consumer products in over 170 countries to estimate their Purchasing Power Parities (PPP), which is a means to compare real values in different currencies.

The meeting will also serve as a forum to promote events in the region for the celebration of the first World Statistics Day, established by the United Nations Statistical Commission for October 20, 2010.

Lastly, the Executive Committee will discuss the priorities of the Conference that will be presented at ECLAC's Thirty-third Session to take place in Brasilia from May 30 to June 1.

 The media is welcome to attend the conference. A preliminary agenda and working documents for the meeting are available on the ECLAC website, here.

For more information, contact ECLAC's Information Services. Email: dpisantiago@cepal.org; telephone: (56-2) 210-2040/2149.