Gemma Van Halderen is Director of the Statistics Division in the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Prior to joining ESCAP in June 2018, Gemma was a member of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Executive Team, leading the transformation of ABS’ statistical programs and implementation of modernized statistical capabilities.
She was responsible for transformation strategies and programs for data sharing, data integration and micro-data access including ABS’ contribution to the Australian Government’s Data Integration Partnership for Australia. Among her many responsibilities at different levels, in 2017, Gemma was seconded to the Commonwealth Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to prepare the Government’s response to a Productivity Commission Inquiry into Data Availability and Use.
Episode Description
The data official statistical offices collect and generate are of vital importance to the work of national governments and international organizations. However, the work of collecting national data can be difficult and at times can be politicized, and as with so much over the last several months, the COVID pandemic has only shown how important national statistics are as well as how fraught their interpretation can be. Official statistics is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: The data official statistical offices collect and generate are of vital importance to the work of national governments and international organizations. However, the work of collecting national data can be difficult and at times can be politicized, and as with so much over the last several months, the COVID pandemic has only shown how important national statistics are as well as how fraught their interpretation can be. Official statistics is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. Joining me are regular panelists John Bailer Chair of Miami’s Statistics Department and Richard Campbell former Chair of Media, Journalism, and Film. Our guest today is Gemma Van Halderen. Van Halderen is Director of the Statistics Division in the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for- I’m going to start that over again, that’s a mouthful. Our guest today is Gemma Van Halderen. Van Halderen is the Director of the Statistics Division in the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, or ESCAP. Prior to joining ESCAP in June 2018, Gemma was a member of the Australian Bureau of Statistics Executive Team where she was responsible for transformation strategies and programs for data sharing, data integration, and microdata access including ABS’ contribution to the Australian Government’s data integration partnership for Australia. Today her main job is to support countries in Asia and the pacific as they strengthen their national statistical offices and systems. Gemma, thank you so much for being here today.
Gemma Van Halderen: Wonderful to be with you, thank you.
Pennington: How did official statistics sort of become the space that you are working in?
Van Halderen: So, I’ve always worked in statistics. I left school and went to the Australian National University and fell into statistics if you like, chose a science degree, and had a fairly quantitative component of math and statistics. And psychology and the statistics part and math part- I just fell into it. I had a wonderful program there, the lecturers at the Australian National University were very good and my supervisor for honors, Professor Allan Welsh was very good and we had a wonderful time together, and I won a cadetship to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and it’s an excellent award that was in place at the time. It was recruiting students in their third year at university and encouraging them to join the Australian Bureau of Statistics at the time, and it gave you a year- you studied for the year to finish your honors year and at the end of the honors year, you had the opportunity to go and work for the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So, coupled with an excellent honors supervisor in professor welsh and with the cadetship with the Australian Bureau of Statistics I basically fell into a really wonderfully institution, had wonderful people working there. One of your Stats and Stories was Dennis Trewin who was a statistician while I was there, Bill McLennan our current statistician or the current statistician of Australian Bureau of Statistics David Grewan. So, I’ve always had a very good conjure of people and a strong methodological group. So after about 30 years- 28-29 years in the Australian Bureau of Statistics had this opportunity to work with the United Nations based in Bangkok Thailand, and here I am, still working in official statistics from the university and school days.
John Bailer: So, I’m curious you described as working to strengthen national statistical offices; so, can you talk a little bit about what does that mean? I mean what are the opportunities that you’ve helped to work with these organizations and what does it mean to strengthen them?
Van Halderen: Sure, so the United Nations ESCAP as commonly knows, the economic social commission for Asia and the Pacific, was based in Asia in the Pacific 58 countries are part of our agreement spanning from Turkey all the way through to all the islands in the Pacific, south to Australia and New Zealand and north to Russia, Mongolia, China. So, we’re and I think about two-thirds of the world’s population live in Asia and the Pacific. It’s a really big community here. So, with 58 countries out of the 193 within the U.N. there’s a lot of opportunities here to reach out to a lot of countries and national statistical offices. Now all of them have their fundamental agreement under the fundamental principles of official statistics to provide high-quality statistics trusted by the public, social conditions, economic conditions, environmental conditions that we have such diversity in our region. So, we have a country in the Pacific which has got a total of four staff for the entire office. Compared to something like China and Russia who has tens of thousands of staff. So when you think of what the international statistical community is asking of these countries to have a high-quality trusted GDP, population census, process, how is unemployment going, how’s your living conditions of your people, basic statistics like births and deaths, and basic population counts. So, my job in the role in the United Nations is very much about providing three main services. The first one is advisory services, and we do a lot of that in this region. And that can be on really anything and you bring in people who have got years of experience in the statistics world to basically help countries settle on thinking of doing something you know, what do you think and it may be something like bringing in administrative data for some of the statistics or making use of new data sources like mobile phone data. You mentioned I worked at the Australian Bureau of Statistics on data sharing and data integration and so it’s providing some experience that I have and connecting people to others in the region with experience to say well give- here’s somewhere you might be able to start. Or here are some of the tips you might want to think about or some of the lessons. So that advisory service, particularly around the moment of COVID-19 is really very valuable. We’re seeing a lot of National Stats offices having to take their time-series going of their job series, their process collection, their G.D.P. series, but how do you do that when really it’s very hard to do fieldwork and face-to-face collection? So it’s providing some tools and some guidance and connecting countries to some experts who have that guidance like the I.L.O., the International Labor Organization in providing excellent guidance around job statistics, there’s an intergovernmental secretary working on international accounts; they’re also providing guidance. So that advisory service to countries – and you know we’re a safe area to give a call to say hey, we might be able to help.
Richard Campbell: You’re mentioning some of the challenges there that you face, what do you do in cases when you’re working in a country and they only have four staff members? How do you even get the data? What kind of support can you offer there?
Van Halderen: Yes, so the small island they call it the small island and developing states. We have quite a number of them here in Asia and the Pacific, the Caribbean also have a cluster of smaller states. Often what happens in that situation is they have a common infrastructure. So, they might run a common census, a cluster of countries, or they might run a common set of multi-cluster surveys or have a common register of businesses in the region. So, in those cases, they’re very creative and they work very well together to have these common elements. They might have common questionnaires and they also are quite good in those small – actually, I’m finding that small countries can sometimes be better for statistics than large countries because they don’t have so many tiers of government, they also have quite a very close-knit community around sharing of data, understanding what information is available already in the country. So, if you think of some of the really large countries like the U.S. or Russia or China this is a huge logistical exercise, so many tiers of government whereas the small ones actually can often be very responsive and they have this nice common community sort of approach to things.
Bailer: So, do you organize a lot of the kinds of investigations around some of the sustainable development goals? Is that part of the focus of work and consulting that you do and advising?
Van Halderen: Yes the sustainable development goals really are the sort of bedrock if you like for sustainable development. The agenda itself, the 2030 agenda is very ambitious, and it has this global monitoring framework in there which has 17 goals, the 169 points and I think we’re now at 231 official indicators.
Bailer: Wow.
Van Halderen: There’s two other parts to the 2030 agenda that I particularly love there’s a paragraph in the 2030 agenda that says something like wherever possible the data for these goals should come from a national statistical system. And then there’s a second paragraph in the 2030 agenda that says we need to make – you know the data demands are quite huge and we need to make use of partnerships and look to innovative data sources such as geospatial information. So, I like to refer to the 2030 agenda rather than the C.G.’s because it gives me a broad arraignment and so the 2030 agenda is a wonderful opportunity for the statistical and national statistics offices. It’s a country-led development agenda and countries can decide how they want to monitor the global contribution to the agenda and they have these opportunities to use their national statistical system and new partnerships and new data sources, very exciting.
Bailer: So, can I follow up with just a real quick question? Can you give an example of one of the goals and one of the indicators that kind of make that a little bit more concrete? Of what are we trying to achieve and what are the ways that we know that we are moving towards it?
Van Halderen: Sure. So, one of the goals is called to let me pick one, goal nine which I’ll read it to you. Build resilient infrastructure promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation. So, this is a really good goal. Now within that goal, it has multiple STG targets, and one of the targets 9.1 is to develop quality, reliable, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure including regional and transporter infrastructure to support economic development and human well-being with a focus on affordable and equitable access for all. So very wordy. Now, these goals for sustainable development targets were signed off at the political level. What the statistical community came and did was supported them through the United Nations Statistical Commission with a developmental indicator framework. And one of the indicators for this target is proportion of the rural population who live within two kilometers of an all-season road. So now so this is saying how many of our rural populations connects to an all-season road. Now if you live in somewhere like Asia like I do, all-season roads are very useful. Just getting to school, getting your goods to market; you can really be cut off in the rainy season and so on. So, this indicator is really great because first of all, you need to have an indicator of the rural population. So here you can make use of your population census population estimates, demography, but then the second part of the indicator is live within two kilometers of an all-season road. So, here’s a great challenge for the statistical community, what is an all-season road? I mean I’m sure we can all measure two kilometers, we would hope we could measure two kilometers [laughter/crosstalk]. But what is an all-season road? And so all of the sudden the part of the statistical world had to start defining road, and then all-season road, across the world. So not just in developed countries like the U.S. or in Australia where I am at the moment but in Asia, in Pacific, where we might still have tracks or people still live in little communities that are down a little track. A lot of people are still also living on water bodies in- on big water bodies. So this is quite a challenge when you unpack it’s quite a challenging indicator and also statistically it’s very exciting because here you need to integrate data from the population side with geographic data like all-season road. So, you have some real very interesting opportunities with using geospatial data, those partnerships I mentioned to you before around bringing in new data sources with the traditional sources to produce just one of 231 indicators for the sustainable development agenda. So, there’s a lot of very exciting opportunities in this indicator framework for national statistical systems.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking with Gemma Van Halderen, Director of the Statistics Division in the U.N. ESCAP. Gemma you were talking earlier about the vast territory that your agency works with and sort of how there might be an office of four people and then these huge staffs. Even with this vast geographic reach are there challenges that the offices tend to share and just kind of have to work out differently or is it really just unique to sort of the specific country that an office has worked in? So, are there issues around collecting data that maybe some share but have to work out differently, maybe depending on where they are?
Van Halderen: Well, the nice thing about the official statistics community, and actually the statistics community more broadly is we’re very strong, and we have a common language around what we work with and our values. So, in a way actually there is a lot of commonality across the vast region of not only Asian and Pacific, but the world. All governments like to understand where they are in relation to others in the world. We look now at our coronavirus; everyone is comparing rates between countries where there’s certainly job/employment issues between countries, GDP between countries, so there is- I don’t know actually what the cost it would be, but there’s a cost that where every country will want the GDP, consumer pricing needs, population numbers at the moment and very unfortunately, death rates and transmission rates. So, all countries in my region all have those common themes. There are also some other commonalities which we all share. Attracting and retaining good staff is something that we all face and this year at our intergovernmental meeting we’re convening a discussion on human resource practices across the region because the chief statisticians wanted to have a conversation about how are you going with your- you know, attracting staff, retaining them, skilling them? So that’s a commonality across us all. There’s also a commonality in relation to financial constraints if you like. We’re all facing financial constraints. We’re all being asked to do more with less.
Bailer: Oh, not us. We’re just days of wine and roses where we are Gemma. [Laughter]
Van Halderen: So- and for instance, our colleagues in Indonesia have just had a 40% cut to their budget in the middle of their population census. So, they’re in the field, they had a very well-structured plan to capture their 260 million people and they have this extremely big budget cut. So financial constraints faces all the offices developed or developing. And so again the chief statisticians like to come together to say just to share experiences about how are you dealing with your financial challenges? The statistical community is also very innovative; I’ve never seen so much innovation and we really do have this urge to produce high quality, relevant statistics, and if it means we have to make use of existing data or shared infrastructure or big data, very willing to give it a go and looking for guidance. So, to me, there’s a lot of commonalities across- and then the differences tend to be in may be different layers of government, whether the legislation requires the collection of data at the potential level or the federal level. Like the local setups usually around infrastructure and governments and the- I think there’s more commonality than you think.
Campbell: So, Gemma do you- we did a recent episode with the epidemiologist Sandra Alba where we talked about some of the distrust that people have in data and science among the general public. Is this something that you face? This sort of suspicion of data that you face in your work. And if not, do they- is this a problem that you have in Australia? We face this here in the states.
Van Halderen: So on the question of mistrust of data- I’ve just listened to the podcast with Dennis Trewin there, around the COVID information and John Pullinger, the President of the ALS; I don’t really see trust as an issue in the main here in Asia and the Pacific. What I do see, and some of the ways that the trust is built from the statistical community here in Asia and Pacific is very strong desire to adhere to the global standards. So they really want to make sure that if there are guidelines on how to produce GDP that they understand those guidelines; they know how to apply them. We translate into the different languages of the U.N. so that language isn’t such a barrier; we provide extensive training. So, the first and foremost we really do want to tie and understand and apply global standards. The fundamental principles of official statistics also quite inherent in all the national statistics offices and you know there is ten of those fundamental principles and the – you know, we have to provide practical utility, the first one is extremely important to the national stats offices. So, the mistrust in data I really don’t see. What I am seeing is a desire to be more responsive and to connect to aspects, responsive in timeliness and responsive in the practical utility- the relevance of the statistic to the government’s needs. The first one in terms of timeliness, this COVID-19 pandemic, while extremely sad and very disruptive, it’s demonstrating to the statistical community that they can put out statistics faster and be more responsive. So, there is a little bit of a silver lining from COVID-19 in the statistics. In terms of relevance it’s also improving the relevance of the statistical community. So, I think the trust in the statistics office is quite good, very good. If you talk about individual statistics, I have to go down to the country level, and I can’t really speak at that level.
Bailer: So, you talked a little bit about the idea of the challenge with COVID having these job series or these price series, these data to be able to maintain those records. And I was reading recently they were talking about how people are going to have to change the way they plot unemployment statistics now. Just because when you look at the time series of this data, all of the sudden we’ve seen things that have never been seen before in terms of this disruption in the workforce. Are there other examples of some of the ways the pandemic has disrupted the way official statistics are collected and the impact of this pandemic on kind of your business?
Van Halderen: So, the other impact that we’re seeing COVID and on the statistical business is in the area of vital statistics; particularly death statistics and cause of death. So, to produce a really good population estimate you need your population census and then births, deaths, and migration into and out of your country or regions. Now the births – getting the birth statistics, there’s very good systems in place for that. There are also very good systems in place for deaths. But at the top of this pandemic- this is causing a lot of pressure on systems. And the coding of causes of deaths is very challenging. And when you overlay that with cultural aspects of dying- there’s a lot of cultures where you have to be buried within 24 hours, so having the opportunity to have your death determined- the cause of the death determined and then recorded and then put into systems- this is putting a lot of pressure on the deaths part of the vital statistics. The World Health Organization has recognized this, the U.N. statistical family has recognized this and there’s a lot of support being given to countries around this topic of birth and death statistics, as well as the cause of death statistics. We here in Asia and the Pacific have started a webinar series if you like, it’s called the Asian Pacific Stats Café. We’re holding cafes so far every week in response to demand for just in time information. We’ve held a café on the impact of civil registration vital statistics systems generally and then we’ve been asked to do a café specifically on the cause of death coding and we’ll do that in about two weeks’ time. And we have a very active regional steering group on civil registration that we’re all active around What’s App, we issue stats briefs, you know, short pieces and provide guidance. So there’s a lot of interest in the topic of deaths, recording of deaths, and then the cause of death and the quality of that is of a concern to the national statistics offices, the demand for timeliness and this is an area where I think not only the job series you mentioned John the area of death and cause of death statistics is something we need to keep an eye on.
Pennington: Well Gemma that’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Thank you so much for being here.
Bailer: Thanks, Gemma.
Van Halderen: It’s been my pleasure. Wonderful. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple Podcasts, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your emails to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.