Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Public organisations collect, supervise and keep track of extremely varied and extensive types of data. Modern technologies and better-organised civil lives have greatly facilitated the collection and custody of these data with a minute granularity and a scale previously unknown. This allows for a much more detailed and sound knowledge of economies and societies. Action should be taken to use these data for a better, easier and more cost-effective evaluation of policies while safeguarding confidentiality of data. At a moment of increasing attention to the efficacy of public spending, it is more important than ever to be able to learn what effects policy measures have on citizens’ lives and societies.

Over the past 30 years, national producers of official statistics have addressed the integrity of their data and outputs and improved public trust in them. It was necessary to protect unpublished data and to demonstrate independence. A distance grew between producers of official statistics and the research community, to the extent that researchers were sometimes excluded from using unpublished microdata altogether. However, since around 2000, significant improvements in the legal, policy, and administrative framework have been made. This means our present and our future can be a partnership of the various skills and perspectives of the official statistics and the research communities, to the benefit of our economy and society.

The balance between the right to privacy and the right to freedom of information is altered when scientific research comes into play, because of its inherent needs and societal function. This paper argues that, for research purposes, microdata should be characterised as a public good. The evolution of the rules and practices in the European Union (EU) for protecting confidentiality, while allowing access to microdata for research purposes is reviewed. Two key directions are identified for further improvement: remote access to confidential data and the enlargement of the notion of ‘European statistics’ to include microdata produced for evaluating interventions (co)financed by the EU.

This chapter provides an overview of data linkage for exploiting and combining information about the same entities across data sources. Data linkage can be deterministic (exact), where each matching variable needs to agree exactly to determine a correct match, or probabilistic, where users allow for errors in the matching variables and assign a probability of a correct match. Through classic decision theory, the chapter determines the set of matches (and non-matches) and provides a linked dataset for further analysis. The chapter also describes some recent advances in record linkage and concludes with some initial research on compensating for linkage errors in the analysis of linked data.

Releasing and disseminating useful microdata while ensuring that no personal or sensitive information is improperly exposed is a complex problem, heavily investigated by the scientific community in the past couple of decades. Various microdata protection approaches have then been proposed, achieving different privacy requirements through appropriate protection techniques. This chapter discusses the privacy risks that can arise in microdata release and illustrates some well-known privacy-preserving techniques and approaches.

The chapter presents the European microdata access system. This system allows eligible researchers to analyse detailed data transmitted to Eurostat by national statistical offices in the European Union. Eurostat is a single entry point of access to such data. Individual data collected by national statistical offices to produce official statistics are strictly confidential. The data are anonymised and further processed before they can be made available for scientific purposes. Statistical offices are legally obliged to protect information received from individual respondents. They use this information solely to produce official statistics. The entities collecting data for other purposes (e.g. administrative, commercial or health) fall into the scope of personal data protection legislation. Statistical confidentiality measures are stricter than those resulting from personal data protection measures.

Social security data are an important resource for labor market research. In Germany, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) of the Federal Employment Agency is responsible for processing these data resources into microdata products and linking them to surveys on individuals and establishments. Since 2004, IAB’s standardized data products have been offered to external scholars by the Institute’s Research Data Center. The provision of data resources to the international scientific community is a great success story. The number of worldwide users is growing steadily. Furthermore, cooperation projects have significantly increased knowledge on the structures and processes of the German labor market. Today, the IAB is part of a worldwide network of top-tier labor market researchers and has substantially improved its evidence-based policy advice.

Hungary introduced a law ensuring access to anonymised personal data for research and policymaking in 2007. The law has forged a compromise between strict provisions on personal data protection and researchers’ needs for microdata that has passed the test of practical application. The Hungarian case may be a model for improving access to administrative data for research and policy analysis in a low-trust environment. The chapter explores stakeholder interests and the negotiation process leading to the new law and also highlights how particular features of the new law satisfied opponents while meeting the demands of data users.

This chapter presents the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) panel. This infrastructure provides an innovative method of data collection and data access. It offers researchers the opportunity to field surveys and conduct experiments, to analyze the effect of interventions, and to link collected survey data to administrative data available from Statistics Netherlands. The infrastructure is used mostly by academic researchers but also by applied researchers, in a wide variety of studies in various disciplines. The authors demonstrate how the LISS infrastructure can be used to carry out relevant scientific and policy research to tackle contemporary societal challenges. The examples of policy-relevant research presented here focus on the adequacy of retirement savings, retirement expenditure goals, and the behavioral responses of individuals to certain policies through stated preference analyses.

Active labour market policies are regarded as an important tool to reduce unemployment in several countries. This chapter describes the design, implementation and evaluation of one such policy, based on the strengthening of the activation efforts (in particular job search support and monitoring) conducted by the public employment services of Portugal since 2012. The analysis draws on rich longitudinal data, the programme’s focus on those unemployed for at least 6 months and (fuzzy) regression discontinuity methods. The results indicate that, despite the weak labour market and relatively light intensity of the intervention, the programme doubled the probability that participating jobseekers become employed. The chapter also draws a number of public policy lessons from this programme and its evaluation.