Invited Session Proposals Due in May

 
The seventh International Conference on Establishment Statistics (ICES VII) will return to an in-person format and be held in Glasgow, Scotland, June 17–20, 2024. Participants will join colleagues from academia, government statistical agencies, private businesses, statistical associations, and other sectors to collaborate on international best practices in concepts, design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination of establishment statistics.

The conference will explore new areas of establishment statistics and exhibit state-of-the-art methodologies and leading-edge technologies based on census data, administrative or other organic data, and sample survey data.

The domain of establishment statistics is facing new challenges and opportunities. ICES VII will showcase the integration of new data sources, application of emerging methods and techniques, and innovative data products while promoting discussion of all aspects related to statistics of businesses, farms, and institutions.

The program committee invites you to submit a proposal for an invited paper session from March 1 – May 15. To ensure that all invited sessions are of consistently high quality, organizers must provide sufficient information to clearly demonstrate the importance of the topic and the quality of its contributions. Members of the program committee encourage proposals addressing one or more related topics and incorporating presenters and perspectives from different countries and organizations. Suggested topics for invited sessions include the following:

• Data sources for establishment statistics (including administrative, open, and private sources)
• Establishment statistics in times of crises (including lessons learned from COVID, war, energy shortages, and climate change)
• Establishing and updating business registers (e.g., considering globalization issues)
• Sample design and sample coordination challenges
• Use of and experiments with new technologies and methodologies for collecting and using data from businesses (including web-scraping and unstructured data)
• Survey communication, respondent relations and motivation (including minimizing nonresponse, confidentiality, and survey ethics) for establishment surveys
• Big data applications and machine learning methods as applied to establishment statistics
• Data science—usage and integration of different data sources in establishment statistics
• New techniques in statistical data editing and imputation
• Estimation and variance estimation challenges (e.g., robust, model-based, small-area estimation; treatment of nonresponse; probability vs. nonprobability samples)
• Confidentiality, disclosure avoidance, differential privacy, and formal privacy as applied to skewed distributions
• Treatment of economic time series (including price adjustment, seasonal adjustment, and benchmarking)
• Quality issues and trade-off with costs, response burden, and timeliness of establishment statistics
• Management issues regarding running business surveys and producing business statistics (including generalized survey systems, IT issues, process monitoring, use of paradata)
• Producing establishment statistics in developing countries
• Environmental statistics, energy statistics
• Indicators focused on timeliness such as high-frequency data from businesses and real-time indicators
• Impact of international manual changes (including revisions of the System of National Accounts, changes to economic classifications, and how to ensure comparisons over time)
• Capturing price data from establishments (including administrative sources, surveys, and calculation of price indices)
• Inclusiveness in establishment statistics (e.g., gender dimension)
• New measures related to labor market and work
• Network statistics, statistics on supply chains and global value chains (GVC), new statistics on globalization
• The impact of globalization on producing statistics (e.g., collecting data from businesses in a globalized world, defining the business population and business sample frame, estimation challenges)
• Unit problem(s)—identification of statistical units and inference about the effects (of misidentification/misclassification) on estimates
• The position of national statistical institutes, survey research agencies, and similar organizations in the modern information market (e.g., statistical leadership, building capability and skills, changing relationships with respondents, other producers of statistics and users)

The conference will include diverse sessions following traditional and modern formats, as well as demonstrations from around the globe to highlight new, improved, and upcoming establishment statistics. Stay tuned for additional calls for contributions to ICES VII over the next year.

ICES Publications

Publications originating from past ICES conferences provide a historical repository of valuable information related to the development and use of establishment statistics. The latest publication is an edited volume based on ICES VI contributions and discussions.

Publication opportunities in Survey Methodology and the Statistical Journal of the IAOS, in addition to conference proceedings, are also planned for ICES VII.