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ECLAC and Ecuador Call for Placing Statistics at the Service of Development with Equality and Environmental Sustainability

The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, and the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Alicia Bárcena, inaugurated in Quito the eighth meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas.
Press Release |
17 November 2015
La Secretaria Ejecutiva de la CEPAL, Alicia Bárcena, y el Presidente de Ecuador, Rafael Correa, durante la inauguración de la octava reunión de la Conferencia Estadística de las Américas de la CEPAL.
La Secretaria Ejecutiva de la CEPAL, Alicia Bárcena, y el Presidente de Ecuador, Rafael Correa, durante la inauguración de la octava reunión de la Conferencia Estadística de las Américas de la CEPAL.

The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, and the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, today made a call to the different social actors to improve the quantity and quality of statistics in order to place them at the service of development with equality in the framework of the 2030 Agenda, during the inauguration of the eighth meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA) in Quito.

A total of 36 delegations from ECLAC’s member and associated states and representatives from 18 United Nations organizations will participate until November 19 at the SCA’s meeting, the main forum for the debate of statistics development in the region, which will be held at the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) building in Quito.

“The new global agenda for development imposes the need to boost on the national statistical systems a revolution to satisfy the demand of information necessary for its implementation and supervision”, Ecuador’s President said and added that this implies strengthening the national statistical systems through allocation of resources, existence of legal frameworks that guarantee its independence and innovation in the processes of data generation.

Rafael Correa advocated for the need to “break the conceptual inertias and progress towards new metrics that challenge the paradigm of traditional concepts.” As an example, he said that not only the “work for the market” should be measured but also the non-remunerated work, as well as the quality of life in general, not only the gross domestic product per capita. “Statistics must be understood as a public good at the service of our democracies,” he underlined.

“The State needs timely and quality statistical information to perform its role in an effective way,” said ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, who also advocated for guaranteeing the autonomy of national statistic offices and for consolidating its guiding role of the national statistic systems. This should be done with the aim of giving back feedback for politics and building a new equation between State, market and society.

Alicia Bárcena encouraged the region’s countries to go beyond traditional measurements and to build metrics that account for distributive inequalities in different spheres. Besides, she upheld the need to push the opening up of data from both the public and private sectors in order to provide answers to the citizenry’s demands of more transparency, access to information and accountability mechanisms.

The United Nations senior official also offered ECLAC’s technical and institutional support for monitoring the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, approved in September by representatives from 193 countries at the UN General Assembly and which contains 17 goals and 169 targets, among them the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the reduction of inequality and the fight against climate change.

On his part, Yuri Chillán, Chief of Staff of Ernesto Samper, the Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), said that today “the world, beyond being divided between those who have and those who do not have, is divided between those who know and those who do not know.” “Massification is not a synonym of democratization, democratization demands available information.”

A seminar on data revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean was held after the inauguration. Additionally, during the SCA, a subsidiary organ of ECLAC, participants will analyze the progress made in the execution of the two-year program for regional and international cooperation activities in 2014-2015, and will approve the SCA’s new Strategic Plan for 2015-2025.

 

More information at:

Web site of the Eighth Meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of ECLAC.

For queries and interviews, contact María Amparo Lasso, Chief of ECLAC’s Public Information Unit.

E-mails: mariaamparo.lasso@cepal.org; prensa@cepal.org; Telephone: (56 2) 2210 2040.

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For media accreditation, contact the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) from Ecuador, e-mail: comunicacion@inec.gob.ec . Telephone: (59-3-2) 25 44326 / 2544561 ext. 1207.

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