22 May 2014
Oxford, UK

University of Oxford WorldStat Meeting

Wolfgang Lutz was invited to participate in the WorldStat meeting organized by the Oxford Martin School.

Background of this meeting is the 2012 initiative The Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations that aims at addressing the growing short-term preoccupations of modern politics and business, and identify ways to overcome today’s gridlock in key international negotiations. The Commission released a first report entitled "Now for the Long Term" in 2013 which contains 15 recommendations, among them the creation of a virtual body to undertake quality control of global statistics, assess national practices, and improve data collection called “WorldStat”.

In this meeting invited experts and persons with particular interest in the topic will discuss and advise the Commission how best to take this idea forward. In particular, the meeting will focus on the objectives and structures of WorldStat, the immediate first steps and the long-term goals, and the generation and allocation of resources to statistics through this channel.

As a professor of social statistics who is struggling with the availability and comparability of global level statistics on a day to day basis, World Population Program Director Wolfgang Lutz is one of the invitees. He supports the initiative's starting point of population statistics and suggests to take the interactions with education statistics into account at an early stage. Human capital, so Lutz, is even more important than just population numbers, and the global data situation in this field is much worse.

Existing international statistic institutes often lack comparable long term time series at national level or can only supply incoherent and fragmentary data sets provided by their member countries, which can be used only very limited for global comparative analyses.

His contribution to the meeting is based on a recent review article in Science on "Integrating Education and Population".


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Last edited: 21 May 2014

CONTACT DETAILS

Wolfgang Lutz

Interim Deputy Director General for Science Directorate - DDG for Science Department

Principal Research Scholar and Senior Program Advisor Population and Just Societies Program

Principal Research Scholar and Senior Program Advisor Social Cohesion, Health, and Wellbeing Research Group - Population and Just Societies Program

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313