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Taking feelings away, the famous quote by Leo Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, could be easily applied to poverty. It is a widespread belief that life is easier for the relatively rich than for the poor. More importantly, however, every poor…
To say that we live in an information age is starting to seem like an understatement. Data are available in unimaginable quantities and humankind is continuously producing more. Around 90% of existing data have been created in the past few years and according to estimates, the amount of data is…
The Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), agreed in December 2015, will come into force in November following today’s vote of the European Parliament, which agreed to ratification by the European Union.With this vote, preceded by clear commitments regarding…
Almost all countries in the world conduct a population and housing census at least every ten years, to produce key data for planning and administration at national and local level. In recent decades, census methodology and technology has developed significantly. Countries in the UNECE region are…
The UNECE region has neither the high economic inequalities typical for the Latin American region nor the high extreme poverty rates faced by some African countries. Yet, poverty continues to be widespread, especially affecting vulnerable population groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants,…
A majority of the 53 UNECE member countries reported a decrease in the unemployment rate in 2015. The average unemployment rate in the UNECE region in 2015 was 8.8 per cent, which is 1.1 percentage points lower than in 2014 (9.9 per cent) and 1.7 percentage points less than in 2013 (10.5 per cent…
UNECE member States are expected to submit national reports that provide an analysis of the current state of realization of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing and its Regional Implementation Strategy (MIPAA/RIS), by 31 October this year, as part of a five-year reporting cycle. An…
The 2012 Vienna Ministerial Declaration on Ageing underlines the importance of life-long learning, longer working life and access to information for older persons. A key factor in facilitating the participation of older persons in political, economic, cultural and social life is their access to…
“What is measured becomes visible; what is visible can be monitored; and what is monitored can be improved”.These words were left ringing in the ears of more than 65 gender statistics experts last week as the final speaker at the UNECE gender statistics work session took the floor in Vilnius,…
Source: UNECE Statistical Database (www.unece.org/stats/data), Eurostat, CISSTAT and national statistics In 2015, in the United States gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 2.4 per cent compared to the previous year – the same growth rate as in…
It is commonly known that global exports exceed global imports. How is it possible? Is it due to the growing exports of goods to the moon? No, it is due to difficulties in capturing global production and trade flows.Businesses once largely confined their production activities to the national…
Recent humanitarian crises combined with continuing globalization have brought the topic of international migration to the forefront of news reports around the world. The effects of cross-border migration are wide ranging and affect both migrants themselves and many non-migrants. As a result,…
We are all more or less familiar with the concept of inflation - rising prices that reduce our purchasing power. The consumer price index (CPI) is the most commonly used measure of consumer price inflation. It measures the average price change of goods and services purchased by households for…
Most of us probably still remember the time when during a family car trip the hard-to-fold windshield-sized paper map was drawn out to determine which way to turn next, or when everyone in the back seat was instructed to keep their eyes open for the next gas station. Now, many of us are used to…
Earlier this month in New York, countries from around the world expressed their appreciation for the work done by UNECE to improve official statistics for the measurement of climate change. Almost twenty countries spoke at the 47th session of the United Nations Statistical Commission, the global…
The percentage of women in parliament has increased across the UNECE region over the last ten years, bringing the average in UNECE member countries from 19% in 2005 to 25% in 2015. In 2015, women accounted for at least 10% of members in all national parliaments. In 2005, 9 countries were still…
Entrepreneurship is a source of innovation and productivity in the global economy. In the 20th century, economic development has relied on big businesses and mass production. Now, smaller firms and creative networks of experts provide knowledge-driven goods and services. In addition, the…
How to measure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? What implications will technological advancements have on the production of statistics? These are two of the topics that will be discussed by the statistical community next week in New York (8-11 March) at the 47th session of the United…
The world is increasingly global. Think about music, movies, fashion, technology…the list goes on. The products we buy are often manufactured in distant places, and while we may not realize it, they often consist of parts developed, produced and assembled in different parts of the world.…
Between 2003 and 2013, the total number of fatalities in road traffic accidents decreased by more than 30 per cent in the UNECE region, reaching 108,857 in 2013. This trend was particularly pronounced between 2007 and 2010 with average annual decreases of more than 8 per cent. Beyond this…
Of the 37 UNECE member countries that reported average monthly wages and annual consumer price indices for 2013 and 2014, 32 saw an increase in real wages in 2014. Real wages only decreased in the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine in this period. With the exception of Ukraine,…
“The Paris climate conference, COP21, seeks to deliver a clear pathway to meet the climate challenge and a system to help us measure and increase progress until we get the job done”, says Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC…
Source: UNECE Statistical database www.unece.org/stats/data After trending downward in 2013 and 2014 inflation in most European economies has remained below 1 per cent through 2015, as measured by the 12 month rates of change of the consumer price index (CPI). Several…
Traditional employment statistics, such as unemployment rates and labour force participation rates, have long been produced by national statistics offices, but they provide only limited information about a country’s labour market situation. Policymakers, governments and researchers have…
“Better data, better lives” is the theme selected for the World Statistics Day on 20 October 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly. It is a day when the international community will be celebrating Official Statistics, data that are behind an incredible amount of information we digest daily…