Head of BPS Indonesia Leads Governing Board of International Comparison Program for Next Three Years
On the first day of activities during the 57th United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) Annual Session in New York on Sunday, 1 March, Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti, Head of Indonesia’s Central Statistics Agency (BPS), was appointed as Chair of the Governing Board of the International Comparison Program (ICP).
The ICP is a collaborative programme involving more than 170 countries that has operated for over 60 years under World Bank management. Its objective is to produce standardised economic measurements to compare economic size and price levels across countries worldwide, most notably through Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) indicators.
The Governing Board is the highest decision-making body within the programme, responsible for oversight, strategic direction, and key decisions to ensure the ICP operates according to its mandate and international standards whilst maintaining accountability of its indicators.
For the next three-year term, the ICP Governing Board will be jointly led by BPS and Brazil’s IBGE (Brazilian National Statistics Office), alongside nine other member countries including Belarus, Canada, Italy, Jordan, Mongolia, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, South Africa, and the Pacific Islands, as well as five international organisations: the World Bank, IMF, UNSD, African Development Bank, and Asian Development Bank.
In her opening remarks as Co-Chair of the ICP Governing Board, Amalia emphasised that global indicators produced by the ICP should be methodologically robust while accommodating the economic characteristics of different regions, particularly developing nations, to ensure greater comparability and equitable economic progress internationally. Indonesia will serve alongside Brazil in leading the Governing Board.
Amalia expressed optimism about the Indonesia-Brazil co-leadership, noting the strong existing collaboration between BPS and IBGE, which has been formalised through a cooperation agreement signed by both heads of state in Jakarta in October last year.
In a written statement, Amalia noted that the international statistical community’s confidence in BPS has strengthened with her appointment as Co-Chair of such an important and strategic programme. She stated: “This confidence once again demonstrates that the methodologies used by BPS not only align with world standards, but we are also recognised as capable of providing direction and oversight of these global standards.”
For BPS, this leadership role adds to the agency’s growing contribution to the global national statistics community, consistent with BPS’s vision of becoming a modern, world-class statistical institution.