WHICH POLICY FRAMEWORKS MATTER AND HOW TO DESCRIBE THEM:

INDICATORS LINKING THE LISBON STRATEGY, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

AND THE MDGs

Supporting slides for the invited paper submitted by Statistical Office of Estonia

STATISTICAL COMMISSION and ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE

CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN STATISTICIANSFifty-third plenary session(Geneva, 13-15 June 2005)

The Dashboard: Working with complex indicator setsThe Dashboard tool, developed by IISD’s “Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indices”

is an attempt to put indicators at the service of democracy.

A car driver or a pilot, they all have a dashboard in front of them, with an impressing amount of instruments that help them to take their decisions. Likewise, the “captains” of nations need the tools to steer our modern societies. In a participatory democracy, citizens want to “look over the shoulder

of the captain”, so that they can understand the decisions of their governments.

Currently, only a handful of indicators, namely the rates of GDP growth, unemployment and inflation, are communicated to the public. Judging government performance with three indicators is like

travelling with a captain who tells passengers “as long as there is fuel on board, and the compass points into the right direction, everything is OK”.

Complexity of decision-making in the 21st Century needs more adequate decision support tools!The Dashboard presents sets of indicators in a simple format based on three principles:

1.the size of a segment reflects the relative importance of the issue described by the indicator;

2.a colour code signals performance relative to others: green means “good”, red means “bad”;

3.the central circle (PPI, Policy Performance Index) summarizes the information of the component

indicatorsThis “language” may seem a straight-jacket for many indicators; however, it is the only way to present very

heterogenous indicators in a common format.

Economy

SocialCare

Environ-ment

PPIPolicy valuation:

very goodgoodokmediumbadvery badcritical

20% 45%

35%

The main, all panels view of the dashboard: the composition of the adapted UN CSD indicator set, based on the Agenda 21 structure.

Millenium Development Goals, Target 4: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and to all levels of education no later than 2015. A simple dashboard view: Y-axis shows the number of points; X-axis shows the respective rank. The points are calculated as follows: 1000*(x-worst)/(best-worst).

MDG theme "Gender equality and empowerment of women“ ranking of the countries on the world level ( for 165 countries in database). On the top is Sweden and the bottom is Chad. One could move the mouse into the map and press Z to zoom in. The score of the index is the weighted average of the component indicators.

Dashboard: Linkage analysisHow is "Malaria prevalence" linked to "Malaria deaths"? Burkina Faso scores "excellent" for "Malaria prevalence " and "serious" for Malaria deaths. In contrast, Botswana gets a "critical" for "Malaria prevalence" and "excellent" for Malaria deaths.

Linkage Analysis: The example of CO2 emissions vs. GDP per capita (UN CSD set)With just one mouse click, the most relevant correlations between the indicators could be displayed. There is a “negative” correlation between CO2 emissions and income. This example could serve also as an illustration for the trade-offs between economy and environment sphere.

Dashboard on regional level: environmental indicators on local government level in Estonia