Vancouver and Washington — a road show

My paper on statistical governance got accepted at the 13th Annual Conference on the Political Economy of international Organizations (PEIO), that was held in Vancouver on February 20-22, 2020. The paper is on the real economic effects of a statistical standard implemented and promoted by the IMF, so I took the chance to also present it in Washington. Being there, I got an invitation from the Fed to present on the statistical challenges of Fintech activities, see the entry on Fintech under topics. I presented both on the classification issues of Fintech and on our household survey on Fintech use in Germany

This was one of the hardest weeks I ever had, but an immensely valuable opportunity to get competent feedback on many important aspects of my current professional work. In a sense, I did this in the last minute — crossing the borders started to get cumbersome and difficult because of Corona. One week later, the trip would have been impossible.

Crossing the Rocky Mountains in February

Tunis — Statistical Governance

In November 29, 2019 the International Statistical Institute (ISI), the Irving Fisher Committee of the BIS (IFC), the African Union and Statistique Tunesie organised a conference on Data Governance in Tunis. This gave me the chance to present the core results of a recent discussion paper on statistical governance and foreign direct investment, with a focus on African economies.

Most delegates came from African countries, both North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Discussions were lively, and in the course of the conference I had the chance to learn a lot about the problems of statistical governance in a rather direct way.

Dusk in Sidi Bou Said