Enrico Giovannini

Enrico Giovannini (born June 6, 1957) is an Italian economist and statistician. Since August 2009 he is President of the Italian Statistical Institute (Istat). From January 2001 to July 2009, he was Director of Statistics and Chief Statistician of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since 2002 he is full professor of economic statistics at the Rome University “Tor Vergata”.

Biography

Born in Rome, he graduated in March 1981 in Economics at La Sapienza University of Rome and continued his studies at the Institute of Economic Policy of the same faculty, specialising in econometric analysis.

In December 1982 he was employed by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat), assigned first at the “Study Service” and later at the “National Accounting Service” where he performed several tasks, taking care of the Italian economic short-term dynamic study and participating in several projects of research.

He was a consultant of the Ministry of Treasury and of the Italian Manufacturers’ Association for the development of their econometric models.

In December 1989 he became research director at the National Institute for Short-term Economic Analysis, where he took care, particularly, of monetary and financial analyses. In January 1992 he moved to National Institute of Statistics (Istat), where he was in charge of the Service for Econometric Studies. In 1992 he was also in charge of the creation of “Istat Annual Report” (a comprehensive analysis of economic, social and environmental developments of Italy) and was chief-editor of the first two editions of the Report.

From December 1993 to May 1997 he was head of the “National Accounting and Economic Analysis” Department; from September 1994 to December 1995 he was also head of the “Dissemination and Data Bank” Department. In December 1996 he was appointed Central Director of the Statistics on Institutions and Enterprises.

During his career, he took part in several national and international committees, including the Council of the Interuniversity Committee for Econometrics (CIDE) and the Council of the Italian Statistical Society. He was member of the high-level Committee for the introduction of the EURO in Italy established by the Ministry of Treasury.

Under his direction started in 2001, the OECD took up a complete reform of its statistical system; it also developed a new statistical information system in order to share the data with other international institutions (United Nations, International Monetary Fund, UNESCO, etc.) and it deeply renewed its products.

He also organised the first three OECD World Forums on "Statistics, Knowledge and Policy", held in Italy (2004), Turkey (2007) and South Korea (2009). in particular, at the end of the 2007 Forum the "Istanbul Declaration" [1] was signed by the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the World Bank and several other institutions.

He has established The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies [2] - hosted by the OECD and run in collaboration with other international and regional partners, including the European Commission and the World Bank. This project seeks to become the world wide reference point for those who wish to measure, or assess, the progress of their societies.

He was member of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress established by the French President Nicholas Sarkozy and chaired the Global Council on "Benchmarking Progress in Societies" established by the World Economic Forum. He is also member of the Advisory Board established by the United Nations Development Programmo to review the Human Development Index.

He is member of the Council of International Statistical Institute and Chair of the Board of the International Comparison Programme (ICP), established by the World Bank to calculate Purchasing Power Parities.

He is author of several books and articles on economic and statistical topics.