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Presentation

With the unanimous adoption of the Act to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion in 2002, Quebec reaffirmed its commitment to make this question a priority. The act establishes the National Strategy to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion, with the objective of making the poverty rate in Quebec one of the lowest of all industrialized nations by 2013, based on accepted measures that allow for international comparisons. The strategy sets out various objectives; to measure their achievement and the success of the strategy, studies are being conducted by the Centre d'étude sur la pauvreté et l'exclusion (CEPE). These studies help us better understand gaps in current knowledge and the limitations of tools used to evaluate progress in achieving the goals outlined for Quebec in the national strategy.

The main objective of the International conference on Social Statistics, Poverty and Social Exclusion: perspectives from Quebec, Canada and Abroad is to take stock of the state of current research and identify knowledge gaps:

How can poverty data be used to compare the situation in different industrialized nations?
What are the scope and the limitations of such comparisons?
How can we define the main dimensions and develop appropriate indicators of social exclusion?
How can we develop process indicators that will allow us to recognize situations of exclusion?
How can social statistics be used to study the influencing factors and the consequences of all dimensions of poverty?
How can statistics be used to study the financial and social cost of poverty, material deprivation, the use of rights, life courses and solutions?
How can we use statistics to build a score card that accounts for all those dimensions to evaluate the outcomes of the Act to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion?

The Conference aims to encourage international exchanges in order to document the diversity of situations and also wants to generate debate between the many different actors involved: organizations that produce statistics, researchers and users.

Conference Poster
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