European Union

This article is part of the series: Politics and government of the European Union

European Parliament President Martin Schulz Largest groups; Joseph Daul: EPP María Badía (Interim): S&D 7th session MEPs (736) 2009-14 term Bureau Vice Presidents Quaestor Conference Legislative procedure

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy Parties List of meetings

Council of the EU Presidency Denmark Configurations General Foreign Economic Euro Legislative procedure Voting Secretariat Secretary-General Uwe Corsepius COREPER

European Commission Barroso Comm. President José M. Barroso Vice Presidents Catherine Ashton Viviane Reding Joaquín Almunia Siim Kallas Neelie Kroes Antonio Tajani Maroš Šefčovič Commissioners Civil Service Secretary-General Catherine Day

Court of Justice Court of Justice General Court Civil Service Tribunal Members Rulings

Other institutions Central Bank President ESCB Euro EMU Eurozone Court of Auditors Budget OLAF Investment Bank CoR EESC Ombudsman Other bodies Agencies National parliaments

Policies and issues Budget Four Freedoms Economic area Single market Area of FS&J Schengen Policies Agricultural Energy Fisheries Regional Citizenship Identity Pro-Europeanism Euroscepticism Integration Supranationalism Federalism U.S.E. Multi-speed Opt-outs Enhanced co-op Withdrawal

Foreign relations High Representative Catherine Ashton Ext. Action Service Foreign Policy Defence Policy Enlargement

Elections 1979, 1984, 1989 1994, 1999, 2004 2009 (last election) 2014 (next election) Political parties Constituencies Referendums

Law Acquis Primacy Subsidiarity Treaties Fundamental Rights Membership v t e

Eurostat is a Directorate-General of the European Commission located in Luxembourg. Its main responsibilities are to provide statistical information to the institutions of the European Union (EU) and to promote the harmonisation of statistical methods across its member states and candidates for accession as well as EFTA countries. The organisations in the different countries which actively cooperate with Eurostat are summarised under the concept of the European Statistical System.

Organisation[link]

As a Directorate-General of the Commission, Eurostat is allocated to the portfolio of the European Commissioner for Taxation and Customs Union, Audit and Anti-Fraud, Algirdas Šemeta ^[1].

The current Director-General of Eurostat is Walter Radermacher (de) since 2008, former President of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. Current Deputy Director-General is Marie Bohatá (cs) since 2004, former President of the Czech Statistical Office.

History[link]

1953 The Statistics Division for the European Coal and Steel Community established.

1958 The European Community founded and the forerunner of Eurostat established.

1959 The present name of Eurostat as the Statistical Office of the European Communities adopted. First publication issued - on agricultural statistics.

1960 First Community Labour Force Survey.

1970 The European System of Integrated Economic Accounts (European System of Accounts, ESA) published and the general Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE) established.

1974 First domain in the statistical database Cronos databank installed.

1988 European Commission adopts a document defining the first policy for statistical information.

1989 The Statistical Programme Committee established and the first programme (1989–1992) adopted by the Council as an instrument for implementing statistical information policy.

1990 The Council adopts a directive on transmission of confidential data to Eurostat, previously an obstacle to Community statistical work.

1991 Eurostat’s role extended as a result of the agreement on establishment of the European Economic Area and adoption of the Maastricht Treaty.

1993 The single market extends Eurostat’s activities e.g. Intrastat established for statistics on intra-EU trade. Eurostat starts issuing regular news releases.

1994 First European household panel held, analysing income, employment, poverty, social exclusion, households, health, etc.

1997 Statistics added for the first time to the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Statistical Law approved by the Council. Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices HICP published for the first time - designed for Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union (EMU) convergence criteria.

1998 The eleven countries in at the start of EMU (EUR-11) announced, and Eurostat issues the first indicators specific to the EMU area.

1999 Start of EMU, 1 January 2001.

2002 Start of the Euro on 1 January, Eurostat supplies key statistics for monetary policy.

2003 Irregularities were suspected in Eurostat, see Eurostat scandal.

2004 Start of free-of-charge dissemination of all statistical data except microdata for research purposes.

2005 Commission Recommendation on the independence, integrity and Accountability of the National and Community Statistical Authorities (European Statistics Code of Practice)

2005 Start of a three year peer review exercise across the European Statistical System to monitor compliance with the Code of Practice.

2007 The currently valid five-year Statistical Programme 2008-2012 was adopted.

2009 New European Regulation governing statistical cooperation in the European Union was adopted.

2010 Following strong critics from within and outside the EU on how it did handle falsified Greek data, Eurostat published a report^[2] to try to justify its procedures.

2011 Revision of European Statistics Code of Practice by the European Statistical System Committee.^[3]

Directors General[link]

Name	Nationality	Term
Rolf Wagenführ	Germany	1952–66
Raymond Dumas	France	1966–73
Jacques Mayer	France	1973–77
Aage Dornonville de la Cour	Denmark	1977–82
Pieter de Geus	Netherlands	1982–84
Silvio Ronchetti	Italy	1984–87
Yves Franchet	France	1987–03
Michel Vanden Abeele	Belgium	2003–04
Günther Hanreich	Austria	2004–06
Hervé Carré	France	2006–08
Walter Radermacher	Germany	2008–present

Main areas of statistical activities[link]

The Eurostat statistical work is structured into Themes and Sub-themes.

General statistical activities related to the European Statistical system are:

• Coordination and governance of the European Statistical System
• Statistical methodological coordination and research
• Statistical quality and reporting

Access to Eurostat statistics[link]

The most important statistics are made available via press releases. They are placed on the Eurostat Internet at 11:00 in the morning. This is also the time that the press release content may be distributed to the public by press agencies.

Eurostat disseminates its statistics free of charge via its Internet and its statistical databases that are accessible via the Internet. The statistics are hierarchically ordered in a navigation tree. Tables are distinguished from multi-dimensional datasets from which the statistics are extracted via an interactive tool.

In addition various printed publications are available either in electronic form free on the internet or in printed form via the EU Bookshop. Only larger publications are charged for as printed copies.

Since September 2009 Eurostat has pioneered a fully electronical way of publishing, Statistics Explained, like Wikipedia based on Mediawiki open source software and with a largely similar structure and navigation. Statistics Explained is not only a dissemination format, however, but also a wiki working platform for producing flagship publications like the Eurostat Yearbook.

Statistical data for research purposes[link]

Microdata, which in principle allows the identification of the statistical unit (e.g. a person in the labour force survey or a company for innovation statistics), is treated as strictly confidential. Under tight security procedures various anonymised datasets are provided to research institutions for validated research projects.

See also[link]

• Eurobarometer
• European Commission
• European Union
• European Forum for GeoStatistics
• Largest cities and metropolitan areas in the European Union (Eurostat)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Eurostat Home Page
• Statistics Explained - wiki-based encyclopaedia / glossary / portal for EU statistics
• Health-EU Portal the official public health portal of the European Union

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eurostat

This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions may be available. (February 2009)

Pedro Díaz (1546, Lupedo, Diocese of Toledo, Spain – 12 January 1618, Mexico) was a Roman Catholic missionary.

At twenty he joined the Society of Jesus, and had already been a teacher of philosophy for two years. In 1572 he was sent by Saint Francis Borgia to Mexico with the first band of Jesuits assigned to that mission, and was the first master of novices in the Province of Mexico. As rector of the colleges of Guadalajara and Mexico, superior of the professed house, provincial, and founder of the colleges of Oaxaca and Guadalajara in Mexico and founder of Mérida in Mexico, and twice procurator to Rome, he occupies a prominent place in the early history of the Jesuits in Mexico.

He was also the first to start the mission work of his brethren among the Indians of New Spain. He wrote the Letteras de Missionibus per Indiam Occidentalem a Nostris de Societate Institutis per annos 1590 et 1591.

External links[link]

• Catholic Encyclopedia article

Sylvie Goulard

Sylvie Goulard (born 6 December 1964 in Marseille) is a French politician. She was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the West region of France in the 2009 European elections. As an MEP she is a member of the Committee for Economic and Monetary Affairs, and ALDE group coordinator, as well as a substitute member of the Committee for Agriculture and Rural Development. She is a member of MoDem's national executive board and Sylvie is also a foreign affairs advisor, and former president of the Mouvement Européen France fr:Mouvement Europeen-France, the oldest pluralist association defending the European ideal. Having graduated with a law degree from the Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III and having studied at both Sciences Po (Paris) and l'Ecole nationale d'administration (ENA) she now teaches at the College of Europe in Bruges.

Background[link]

Political advisor to Romano Prodi when he was President of the European Commission, from 2001 to 2004, she followed the work of the Convention presided by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing which was primarily made up of members of national parliaments, who had been charged by the European Council to draft a European constitution.

Sylvie Goulard's work focuses on the necessity of pursuing European integration whilst also inviting increased public debate about European questions. Europe's citizens must become more engaged with its development in the future. They need to be informed and active: and to achieve this cultural and professional exchanges and learning foreign languages are essential.

In 2004, before accession discussions were opened with Turkey, Sylvie had taken a position in the debate concerning the eventual enlargement of the European Union to include this country by underlining the necessity of preserving the European Union's political ambitions and its capacity to act. She also called for doubts expressed by citizens facing a European venture, whose direction they do not properly understand, to be taken seriously.

At the end of 2006 she was elected president of the Mouvement Européen-France (ME-F), succeeding Pierre Moscovici, who had also been a candidate. She was re-elected as president in December 2008.

Le Mouvement Européen-France regularly organises meetings, conferences and debates which aim are to enable a dialogue between political figures, experts and the general public.

In the context of a series of monthly conferences entitled "European Realities", organised in partnership with MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France), the ME-F gave the floor to the CEOs of companies so that they could concretely explain how they live and experience Europe on a daily basis. For further details see www.mouvement-europeen.eu.

On 15 September 2010 Sylvie Goulard supported the new initiative Spinelli Group, which was founded to reinvigorate the strive for federalisation of the European Union (EU). Other prominent supporters are: Jacques Delors, Joschka Fischer, Andrew Duff, Elmar Brok.

Sylvie Goulard writes regularly in a wide range of both French (Le Monde, La Croix, Libération) and international (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Financial Times particularly) newspapers.

References[link]

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the French Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sylvie Goulard