32 research outputs found
Monitoring conflict risk: The contribution of globally used indicator systems
No full textThe Chapter deals with the contribution of globally used indicator systems, in particular governance, environmental and MDG indicators, to the measurement of the risk of violent conflict. The author argues that instead of specialising on conflict indicators in a narrow sense, one should rather go for a highly public and transparent broad indicator set along the lines of a Sustainable Development Index; the reason being that only a mainstream index can exert media pressure on political actors.JRC.DG.G.3 - Econometrics and applied statistic
EU-UN Cooperation for Sustainable Development
No full textSustainable Development has become a high-level objective for the European Union. This contribution explores the current sustainable development agendas in the international discourse, and discusses the role of the European Union as a “sustainable development player” at the United Nations. Priorities for sustainable development in the future are outlined, with particular emphasis on the role of the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development frameworks and their respective indicator sets.JRC.G.9 - Econometrics and statistical support to antifrau
Measuring European Environmental Policy Performance
No full textIn democratic societies, citizens have the right to know whether their elected representatives
address environmental problems successfully or not. Voters can judge their governments' economic
performance by looking at GDP growth and unemployment rates; equally simple measures for
environmental policies face a number of obstacles, inter alia: the complexity of the policy field
"environment", lack and quality of data, absence of scientific and political consensus on the relative
importance of sub-fields like climate change, waste, biodiversity etc., and the tendency of expert
communities to get lost in details rather than communicating the big picture. This paper will show
ways and define rules how to overcome these obstacles.JRC.G.1 - Scientific Support to Financial Analysi
On the art of aggregating "apples & oranges"
No full textThe Communication on Environmental Indicators and Green National Accounting (Com (94) 670 final, 21.12.94) laid the basis for indicator and accounting projects aimed to give comprehensive support to environmental policy, like GARP and GreenStamp. The article is intended to demonstrate: that indicators are a powerful driving force of many, if not most, political decisions; that bad indicators are thus a recipe for bad politics; how an indicator system that serves democratic decision-making should be designed. In particular, in order to avoid serious policy distortions, environmental policy needs a broad spectrum of indicators covering all relevant issues. Valuation projects that treat pollutants with sophisticated methodologies like Impact Pathway Analysis (GARP) or Avoidance Cost-based economic modelling (GreenStamp) face data availability problems which force them in practice to concentrate on selected pollutants, excluding all others; the result is policy distortion. The author proposes that valuation methodologies should focus on general patterns, like the dependence of Avoidance Costs from implementation speed, type of instruments, and level of analysis (i.e. company, sector, national economy, EU economy), instead of treating single pollutants with unnecessary precision while neglecting many others. Policy Performance Indices (PPI) may serve as an instrument to extend such general valuations to a broad range of pollutants and policy questions, using numéraires plus relative weighting as the basis for valuations
MILDEVGOALS: HTML routine to display Millenium Development Goals indicators
No full textThe "Dashboard of Sustainability" is a free, non-commercial software which allows to present complex indicator sets in a highly communicative format. The software offers plenty of specialised features for working with indicator sets that are suitable for aggregation to indices. A simple interface to Excel allows creation of own dashboards on the fly. The simplified web version presents the Millennium Development Goals indicators based on United Nations statistics.indicators, indices, aggregation, linkage analysis, sensitivity analysis, sustainable development, Millennium Development Goals
MDG Dashboard of Sustainability
No full textThe complexity of societies in the 21st century requires an adequate information system. As Europeans, we are proud of our democratic system. However, a functioning democracy needs citizens who underst and what their governments are doing.JRC.DG.G.3 - Econometrics and applied statistic
