Methods to Foster Transparency and Reproducibility of Federal Statistics Proceedings of a Workshop (2019) / Chapter Skim
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4 Benefits and Costs of Transparency: Views from the United Kingdom and Canada
4 Benefits and Costs of Transparency: Views from the United Kingdom and Canada
Pages 25-40
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As ONS increases its use of administrative data, the burden becomes increasingly hard to measure. What is the burden of collecting administrative data, and what is its value to decision making for public policies?
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Although ONS produces most of the statistics for the Authority, there are other government agencies that produce their own: notably, agricultural statistics and health statistics are not under ONS's jurisdiction. The second entity is ONS; it not only produces the majority of the nation's official statistics, but it also has the goal of improving national statistics.
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There is a huge amount of data produced, some of which is administrative data that taxpayers have paid to produce and arguably own as well. How does ONS make that available?
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6. Produce official statistics according to scientific principles.
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Furthermore, the methods library will include not just the methods but also the code that sits behind the methods, including such information as when it was last updated and when it will be updated again. ERIC RANCOURT: FOREIGN VIEW OF THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF TRANSPARENCY Eric Rancourt said that his goal was to outline the information management strategy that they have at Statistics Canada.
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Rancourt noted that since 1953, Statistics Canada has been very s urvey-centric, but it is now changing the paradigm to consider administrative data first. By administrative data, he said, he means nonsurvey data, which include satellite imagery, sensor data, data from the private sector, data from telephone companies, data from credit cards, etc.
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Rancourt added that there are outside drivers for Statistics Canada's information management strategy. Society is changing, and there are increased demands and different views of statistics and data needs.
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. Statistics Canada allows everyone to work in a collaborative space, but information of business value covers documents that are collaboratively refined to a final version.
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To address this issue, he said, Statistics Canada explicitly put in place a lean process to prevent having too much bureaucracy. Rancourt then discussed progress to date on implementing Statistics Canada's information management strategy.
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Rancourt continued that traditionally their data were from survey collections, but now they have a lot of administrative data. Some of the data are already public, but some are only for internal consumption.
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Rancourt said that Statistics Canada's approaches are still very survey-centric. Over the years, the agency used administrative records data, like most other statistical agencies, to help build frames and to have information for more intelligent sampling, for editing, for imputation, for calibration, and for estimation.
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The participant continued that the interesting scientific question is how to design surveys to validate administrative data, in contrast to using surveys to get the data and using administrative data to validate the surveys. Rancourt responded that he thinks the key point for official statistics is to remain capable of doing inference for the complete population.
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From page 37... ...
Another participant raised questions about challenges to transparency: once an agency moves to administrative data, it loses control over the data production process. Because an agency does not control the entire process, the metadata associated with acquisition and the documentation of how these things are collected is going to be a bigger challenge than if the agency had done this in-house.
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Rancourt added that using administrative data is not new. Statistics Canada has been using administrative data for many years.
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People have spent decades measuring data quality with validation tests, field tests, pretests, and posttests; part of the bias against administrative data comes from the fact that no one knows if they are better or worse. It is not known in part because there is no access to the instrument itself.
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