Carnatic vocalist Palghat Ramprasad Rajaram, who is also an economist from Harvard, is teaming up with Radhika Asrani, an alumnus of the London School of Economics, to present a paper related to health management systems and data collection / dissemination of poverty and income statistics at a seminar during the Asia-Pacific Economic Statistics Week, which is to be held in Bangkok between May 22 and 26.
The seminar is jointly conducted by UNESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) and the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI). It is designed within the Regional Programme on Economic Statistics for Asia and the Pacific under the theme of advancing economic statistics for the sustainable development goals.
A variety of sessions will add perspectives on the theme, including legal and institutional frameworks, environmental and natural resources accounting, statistical business registers, big data, quality assurance frameworks, national accounts and dissemination and communication of statistical products.
The seminar, being supported by a task force working under the Steering Group, comprises Malaysia, India, Indonesia, New Zealand and Turkey.
“Our study fits into the theme of production of economics statistics, which can help track progress towards achieving the sustainable development goals,” Dr. Ramaprasad said.
Their paper will focus on understanding how large information systems in health can be used as a framework to collect surrogate measures of poverty and income. The proposed framework, according to him, suggests ways to gather poverty and income surrogates more frequently than the official statistics covering a wider population and will simultaneously improve the efficacy of data collection, monitoring and dissemination of MCH data as well.
“Our proposed methodology has potentially direct implications for advancing and complementing the current economic indicators by producing shadow or proxy measures of important economic indicators on income and poverty more frequently, and generating alternative real-time globally accepted socio-economic indicators such as Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index, Human Development Index or Gender Development Index,” he added.
