The BNSI President Assoc. Prof. Mariana Kotzeva will participate in the high level Conference on “Statistics for policymaking: Europe 2020”. The Conference will take place on 10-11 March 2011 at the European Commission in Brussels and is organized by the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat). The Conference aims at bringing together policy makers and statisticians in a dialogue on how to structure statistical data to support politics and policy making in the European Union.

More than 400 people have registered their participation in this important for the European statistics event. The Conference will be opened by the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso. The Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs Olli Rehn, the Commissioner for Environment Janez Potočnik, the Deputy Secretary-General and Chief Economist of the OECD Pier Carlo Padoan, the Director-General of Eurostat Walter Radermacher, the Deputy Director-General of Eurostat Marie Bohatá as well as many other representatives of the European statistical and scientific spheres will make presentations.

Discussions will take place in three parallel sessions on the following topics:

- Smart growth: innovation indicators, education, digital Europe;

- Sustainable growth: indicators for green growth;

- Inclusive growth: indicators on poverty and social/economic exclusion

The development of indicators for the Strategy “Europe 2020” for strengthening the coordination of the economic policy for stability, growth and job opportunities within the EU will be the basis of the two-day discussions. The initiative will show how the specific statistical indicators can be used for defining political objectives; how to evaluate the various policies and how this relates to providing high quality statistical data from European statistics.