Research / Statistics
International Organization Information / Research: 2003 (Part #8)
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Statistics projects Over the past three years, the UIA has invested in progressive rationalization of the statistical data it has published during the 20th century, whether in the Yearbook itself or in articles in Transnational Associations. Data in the Yearbook tables over that period has been incorporated into Excel tables. Work remains to be done on early statistical studies (pre-1980) published in Transnational Associations. At present the UIA has three annual statistical projects:
- (a) February-May: a contract with the Centre for Civil Society of the London School of Economics for production of selected tables on NGOs in their Global Civil Society Yearbook. As noted below, the timing of this work has proved to be extremely inconvenient in relation to the UIA Yearbook production cycle because they continue to depend in part on data generated for the version of Volume 1 in production.
- (b) June-August: the production of International Meeting Statistics for Associate Members
- (c) August-October: the principal section of Volume 5 of the Yearbook of International Organizations (as indicated above).
The contents of these three projects overlap but have raised issues about UIA 's ability to produce them annually as a consequence of progressive reduction in involvement of Nadia McLaren who has rationalized their production during 2001 and 2002 (as well as integrating scattered statistical data from past decades). In contrast to other reference projects, the new formats required by these products call for extensive use of software packages (Excel notably and Adobe PDF) to achieve the quality of graphics output and the adaptation to stringent printing formats. At this point a transition process, under the guidance of Nadia McLaren, a significant amount of work is being undertaken for 2003 by outsourcing it to the Slovakian company (Delphi). However despite satisfactory results, there remains concern about the continuity of the operation in the absence of Nadia McLaren.
Montecatini: Professor Gianni Tibaldi invited the UIA to participate in a workshop to be organized under the auspices of the UN University as an immediate precursor to the European Conference of Ministers of the Environment (July 2003). At Professor Tibaldi's request a presentation was made to the organizing group on 21 March in Montecatini by Anthony Judge, Nadia McLaren and Tomáš Fülöpp. It was tentatively agreed that the UIA would make a multimedia presentation in a poster session. UIA involvement was however finally discontinued due to lack of funds.
Working Group on NGOs on Hazardous Missions: No further activity has been undertaken on this theme since the last report. Dr Yves Beigbeider has suggested that the group should be terminated.
World Summit on the Information Society: This event is to be held in Geneva (10-12 December 2003) and in Tunis (2005). Currently the Secretariat recommends, if resources can be found within current priorities, that UIA participation take the same form as that for the World Summit on Social Development (Geneva, 2000) with presentation of multimedia displays of its data. It should be remembered that many UN agencies are already accessing UIA data online and this usage can be usefully reinforced.