Many thanks, Jochen!
Nice to have fans at the European Commission. As mentioned not long ago, GTF recently published the EIU’s e-readiness rankings for 2007, which separates the digital leaders from the laggers among 69 countries worldwide.
Well, a few days ago, we heard from Jochen Jesinghaus, who works in Italy in an EC unit which specialises in the aggregation of complex indicator systems. In other words, Jochen and his colleagues transform Excel spreadsheets into something that the rest of us, including MEPs and EC bureaucrats, can easily read and interpret.
Jochen wanted our permission to weave some of his magic with our rankings, putting them into a dashboard format.
The result can be seen here, in glorious colour. Go ahead and click on your country or the countries you are interested in. The results are dramatic. And thanks again, Jochen.
May 17, 2007 at 9:20 am
Dear Carla,
Over here in Italy, at the EC’s Joint Research Centre, we (the crew of Andrea Saltelli) are trying to organise the jungle of the information society by aggregating complex indicator systems to something more digestible. We are grateful that the EIU has done pioneer work on organising the sub-jungle of e-readiness - congratulations for the good job, and thanks for giving us permission to use your indicators as a good example!
Eurostat and OECD have roughly 200 “key” indicators in their databases. Users may be overwhelmed by so many indicators, but this abundance is just proof that policy-making in Europe has become very complex. In democratic societies, ordinary citizens should have the right to understand what’s going on - and cautious aggregation is the only way to prevent that citizens give up too early in front of a battery of 200 indicators. “E-readiness” is something everybody can understand - and if a strong institution such as the Economist guarantees that the underlying methodology and data are OK, then citizens are enabled to draw conclusions about their governments’ e-readiness performance. We need more of such commitments, for example in areas like gender equality, active citizenship, education and health systems, or how we perform in tackling immigration and the ageing society. Thanks for giving us a good example…