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THE EMERGING INFORMATION SOCIETY
Information Society with its new economic environment poses huge challenges for statistical measurement instruments and processes. More rigorously relevant, reliable, timely and comparable statistics are needed to account for the major social and economic shifts that underlie Information Society developments. Tracking initiatives such as e-Europe requires practical mechanisms to be set up to generate statistical indicators of change so that progress in all relevant domains can be benchmarked. Currently available data must be supplemented perhaps even substantially replaced by a fresh approach delivering the required new statistics. Many features of the Knowledge Economy are regional in nature. In a Europe of Regions, regional variation in the pace and pattern of change is having and will have enormous impact on the structure of the Union, on the task of maximising cohesion and on the policies for promoting and managing the effects of change.
NEW STATISTICAL INDICATORS
The aim of the BISER project is to develop, define and pilot statistical indicators for measuring and benchmarking the impact of the Knowledge Economy on Europe's regions, based on a model of factors influencing regional development. Each region's economy and society is examined in the context of the underlying structural foundations of the Information Society.
THE BISER APPROACH
The principal aim is not a traditional ranking, nor is it intended to crown "winners" or stigmatise "losers", but to highlight differences in the structural foundations of regional European economies and societies and to focus attention on policies which can promote cohesion in economic and societal development in the Information Society.
THE BISER PROCESS CONSISTS OF THE FOLLOWING STEPS. THE PROJECT:
- thoroughly assesses existing conceptual approaches relating to the emergence of the Information Society and the Net Economy to build a model of regional development showing the role of all relevant factors at an appropriate level of detail;
- defines a theoretically founded and transparent set of statistical variables, the "e-Europe Regions Indicators" to accurately track development of Europe's regions in the Information Society;
- analyses current and forthcoming statistical measures from official supranational and national statistical agencies commercial research firms and other sources and develops by the way of rapid prototyping adequate operationalisations of component variables for which fresh data collection is required;
- designs and conducts regional surveys of the general population as well as of key decision-makers in regions across the EU and uses the results to point up developments in sectoral subgroups of the economy, especially those that act as multipliers (e.g. the education system);
- identifies patterns of development offering opportunities to accelerate development through regional collaboration and/or targeted policies.
GETTING INVOLVED
In doing so, BISER seeks close co-operation with all organisations engaged in the production of statistical data on issues relevant to the Information Society, especially (but not limited to) the National Statistical Institutes and supra-national organisations such as Eurostat and the OECD. The BISER project produces a complete handbook of indicator design to facilitate repeat indicator construction in longitudinal tracking and benchmarking, containing for all defined e-Europe Regions Indicators the list of component variables, operationalisation criteria and instruments, sources of complementary component statistics, notes on methodological issues and details of any possible requirements to adapt/replace indicators in the course of further development. The handbook and all the project documents are available on this web site.
