Microdata collection and openness in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

This article uses a “mystery client” approach and visits the websites of National Statistical Offices and international microdata libraries to assess whether foundational microdata sets for countries in the Middle East and North Africa region are collected, up to date, and made available to researchers. The focus is on population and economic censuses, price data and consumption, labor, health, and establishment surveys. The results show that about half of the expected core data sets are being collected and that only a fraction is made available publicly. As a consequence, many summary statistics, including national accounts and welfare estimates, are outdated and of limited relevance to decision-makers. Additional investments in microdata collection and publication of the data once collected are strongly advised.

Reviewing Assessment Tools for Measuring Country Statistical Capacity

“…In particular, the index was used to help highlight various gaps in countries' data dissemination and openness, with higher statistical capacity levels being positively correlated with more NSO independence (World Bank, 2021). The index has inspired further research on assessing data openness and accessibility in MENA, a traditionally data-scarce region (Ekhator-Mobayode and Hoogeveen, 2022), or how best to construct measures for learning deficiency due to Covid-19-induced school closures (Azevedo, 2020), or to better understand how NSOs respond and adjust to the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (Wollburg et al, 2022). It also contributes to current thinking not only on improving the quality of NSSs, government use of data, and future official statistics (Radermacher, 2021;Asher et al, 2022;Bersales, 2022), but also on other topics such as reducing GDP growth forecast errors (Gatti et al, 2023), measuring public sector digital transformation (Dener et al, 2021) and food and agriculture statistics (Bizier et al, 2022), and selecting the appropriate context to measure student absenteeism and women's empowerment (Yount et al, 2022;Evans and Acosta, 2023).…”

Accelerating and enhancing the generation of socioeconomic data to inform forced displacement policy and response

“…These include increasing the discoverability of microdata relevant to forced displacement through identification and tagging on dissemination platforms. This is underway for the World Bank Microdata Library, 28 and there would be collective benefit in applying the similar approaches on other platforms that host microdata with relevance for forced displacement, including government data portals (Ekhator-Mobayode and Hoogeveen, 2022).…”