The value of data matching for public poverty initiatives: a local voucher program example

Abstract

The recent surge of data-driven methods in social policy have created new opportunities to assess existing poverty programs. The expectation is that the combination of advanced methods and more data can calculate the effectiveness of public interventions more accurately and tailor local initiatives accordingly. Specifically, nonmonetary indicators are increasingly being measured at micro levels in order to target social exclusion in combination with poverty. However, the multidimensional character of poverty, local context, and data matching pose challenges to data-driven analyses. By linking Dutch household-level data with policy-initiative-specific data at local level, we present an explorative study on the uptake of a local poverty pass. The goal is to unravel pass usage in terms of household income and location as well as the age of users. We find that income and age play a role in whether the pass is used, and usage differs per neighborhood. With this, the paper feeds into the discourse on how to operationalize and design data matching work in the multidimensional space of poverty and nonmonetary government initiatives.

Data-centric public services as potential source of policy knowledge. Can “design for policy” help?

“…Conversely, the contextual views focus on specific institutional contexts in which data-driven innovations unfold, e.g. by focusing on a certain governance level, policy area or tool (Durrant et al , 2018; Giest et al , 2021; Lanza, 2021; Malomo and Sena, 2015; Williamson, 2016).…”

“…Aggregated administrative or micro-data can describe large-scale phenomena of public interest, broader than the individual services in which data are collected (Malomo and Sena, 2015). In this perspective, public services may increasingly not only regard service provision but become a source of information for policymaking, de facto working as digital interfaces between governments and other societal actors and probes into relevant policy areas (Giest et al , 2021). Further, they could be the basis of localised experimentation and stakeholders’ engagement in relation to a given public issue.…”