Analysis of administrative data making social and economic policies more effective
Increased use of data gathered by public administration bodies is helping experts and decisionmakers design more effective social and economic policies, researchers and representatives of Polish government ministries said during a seminar organised by the Institute for Structural Research (IBS).
Poland’s government has hundreds of data sets about its citizens and companies, but they’re only rarely analysed, partly because they’re poorly integrated. The Ministry of Digital Affairs and other public bodies are working on the Integrated Analytical Platform, which will centralize and standardize data held by the public administration.
“Advanced data analytics is all the rage in business, and now it’s time for public institutions to realize they’re also sitting on a gold mine,” said IBS Vice President Iga Magda, lead researcher for the youth employment project. “If you’re going to offer your citizens services that match their actual needs, you need to leverage the knowledge that’s available in these data sets.”
Participants in the Oct. 4 seminar included:
* Agnieszka Chłoń-Domińczak of the Warsaw School of Economics and the National Information Processing Institute, who described the Integrated Analytical Platform project and demonstrated a practical use of administrative data. The Economic Outcomes for Graduates (ELA) programme combines data from institutions of higher education with those of Poland’s ZUS social welfare fund, to monitor where a university’s graduates end up.
* Marta Palczyńska of the IBS and Tomasz Gajderowicz from the University of Warsaw, who presented their experience in using data from unemployment registries to evaluate the effectiveness of active labour market policies in employment offices.
* Michał Myck of the Centre for Economic Analysis, who gave a comparative analysis of surveys versus administrative data in evaluating tax and benefit policies.
* Paweł Chrostek of the Finance Ministry, who discussed the advantages of using combined data from the tax and social insurance registries to assess social and economic policy.
IBS organised the seminar as part of the “Youth employment partnerSHIP" project, which seeks to increase employment of young people, so called NEETs (not in employment, education or training) in Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain.