Ladies and Gentlemen!

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 96th DGINS Conference to be held on 30 September 2010 back to back with the 6th ESSC on 1 October 2010 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

It is a great honour for my country to host such an outstanding event. Measuring progress, well-being and sustainable development is a challenge for the European Statistical System and therefore, a strategic and important topic for the 2010 DGINS Conference and extremely relevant in the new political context set up by the “Europe 2020” strategy.

I am convinced that your work during the conference will be fruitful and will result in a set of useful ideas and suggestions for the further work on better measuring progress in its various dimensions in response to the new demands for statistics defined in the Communication of the Commission “GDP and Beyond- measuring progress in a changing world” and the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission Report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress.

Boyko Borissov,
Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria

Dear colleagues and friends!

On behalf of the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria I warmly welcome you all to the 96th DGINS Conference “Measuring progress, well-being and sustainable development”.

It is a great honour for us to host such a high-level forum in the year 2010 when our statistics celebrates its 130th anniversary. The complexity and multifaceted nature of the conference topic poses a real challenge in front of us to have a focused and well structured discussion in a very short period of time.

I strongly believe that the conference will be a very intensive and rich of content forum for exchange of experience and new ideas for better measuring progress in three directions: i) Households perspective and distributional aspects of income, consumption; ii) Environmental sustainability; and iii) Multidimensional measures of quality of life.

I am looking forward to welcoming you all in Sofia.

Mariana Kotzeva
President of the National Statistical Institute