The thirteenth meeting of the Consortium Board (CB) of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) took place at INED in Paris from 9-10 November 2006. In the absence of John Hobcraft, Chair of the CB, François Héran chaired the meeting.
Contextual Database Group (CDBG)
Dora Kostova from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research will take over the coordination of the CDBG from Martin Speilauer.
CDB is expanding, as data from more countries are included. Eight to nine additional countries are expected to be included into the CDB by the end of 2007. This calls for some methodological activities in order to ensure a high level of standardization and comparability. These activities include, in the first place, defining key areas and key variables and, in the next step, data sources, methods of estimation and methods of data collection. The report on them should be reflected in the form of harmonization guidelines of the CDB.
Analysis Working Group (AWG)
Development of the GGS Wave 1 standard tables is progressing and the Consortium Board has accepted the proposal for the preparation of the GGS Analysis paper. The generation and publication of the GGS Wave 1 Standard Tables will mark the end of the harmonization process and imminent data release for each respective country.
The standard tables are under constant development. Among other issues, the development of child-oriented standard tables has been discussed and the feasibility of their development will be studied. Complex weighting schemes and preparation of the child-oriented databases might represent a considerable obstacle to their realization.
The references and links to existing publications using the concept of the GGP will be collected and made publicly available through the GGP web site.
Online system for progress reporting
PAU has launched an on-line system for progress reporting on national implementation of GGP. This system enables the participating countries to continuously update information on their own country while allowing for monitoring progress in others.
Preparation of the 5th IWG meeting
The upcoming IWG meeting will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 18-20 January 2007. The central topics of the meeting will be the submission of GGS Wave 1 data and starting of the GGP data archive and the presentation of the standard tables. The standard tables and the outline of the conceptual paper will be presented at the meeting.
2008 GGP Conference
The major event in 2008 will be the conference on "Causes and Consequences of Demographic Change: Policy-Relevant Insights from the Generations and Gender Programme". The speakers and the audience of the conference would consist of both policy makers and scientists. The papers for the conference will focus on comparative analysis.