On 23 September, our ISI Elected Member, Ms. Almut Steger, passed away at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main after a short illness.
Almut Steger was an Elected Member since 1996 and served on the ISI Council for four years. She was managing director (1984–1988), as treasurer and member of the executive committee (1989–2006) of the German Statistical Society. She also represented the Deutsche Bundesbank on the Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics (IFC), where she was Chair of the Executive Committee. She was also a member of an expert group at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she was appointed to the Balance of Payments Committee (BOPCOM) and collaborated on the new edition of the Balance of Payments Manual (International Monetary Fund 2009).
Almut Steger was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1948 and graduated from the Heinrich von Gagern Gymnasium, a school specialising in classical languages. She describes her path to statistics beautifully in an interview (Krämer 2021): "My father died before I started university. That's why I had to choose a subject that would quickly lead to employment, and that's how I ended up studying business administration. Otherwise, I might have studied art history or dug in the desert. I've always had several main interests, which didn't exactly make choosing a subject easy. During my undergraduate studies, I took statistics with Adolf Blind, and his lectures impressed me so much that I chose statistics as a compulsory subject in my postgraduate studies."
After graduating from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Frankfurt, Almut Steger took up a research position in the legendary SPES project (Social Policy Decision-Making and Indicator System for the Federal Republic of Germany) under Heinz Grohmann (she remained friends with this mentor throughout her life) and moved to the Deutsche Bundesbank after completing her doctorate (Steger 1980). There, she initially focused on balance of payments statistics and the further development and harmonisation of the relevant reporting systems in Europe, and later also on international trade in services. This led to her involvement in the United Nations Interagency Task Force, which produced the Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services, first published in 2002 and, following a global consultation, in a second edition in 2010 (United Nations 2010).
Source: Nachruf Almut Steger | AStA Wirtschafts- und Sozialstatistisches Archiv
