Open data and open government data have recently attracted much attention as a means to innovate, add value, and improve outcomes in a variety of sectors, public and private.
... See More + Although some of the benefits of open data initiatives have been assessed in the past, particularly their economic and financial returns, it is often more difficult to evaluate their social and political impacts. In the public sector, a murky theory of change has emerged that links the use of open government data with greater government accountability as well as improved service delivery in key sectors, including health and education, among others. In the absence of cross-country empirical research on this topic, this paper asks the following: Based on the evidence available, to what extent and for what reasons is the use of open government data associated with higher levels of accountability and improved service delivery in developing countries? To answer this question, the paper constructs a unique data set that operationalizes open government data, government accountability, service delivery, as well as other intervening and control variables. Relying on data from 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper finds a number of significant associations between open government data, accountability, and service delivery. However, the findings suggest differentiated effects of open government data across the health and education sectors, as well as with respect to service provision and service delivery outcomes. Although this early research has limitations and does not attempt to establish a purely causal relationship between the variables, it provides initial empirical support for claims about the efficacy of open government data for improving accountability and service delivery.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8873 JUN 04, 2019
The ongoing data revolution has made a prodigious amount of new data and analytical tools available to researchers. This data is available at higher frequency and at a much more granular level that traditional data collected through field work and surveys.
... See More + This creates new opportunities for research but also raises significant questions about the usefulness, reliability, and quality of such data. Proponents of big data research have called for the development of new analytical techniques and tools to take advantage of new opportunities while others have cautioned against its seductive power. The note provides a description of tools to both gather and analyze data from alternative, digital sources and apply them to answer some of the research and measurement questions related to entrepreneurship ecosystem assessments. In general, the report demonstrates that such data can be a powerful complement to standard data sources, if used carefully and in the appropriate context.
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Working Paper 138910 JUN 01, 2019
Onglao,Ma. Regina Paz Saquido; Lal Das,PrasannaDisclosed
Electronic reverse auctions are the most used competitive method for procurement of goods and non-consulting services by the Federal Government of Brazil.
... See More + These auctions are closed randomly, which perfectly satisfies fairness considerations but may be suboptimal from an efficiency perspective. There are concerns that tenders are closed too early and randomness favors bidders with algorithmic bidding software, leading to high prices. Hence, this paper investigates what would happen if the random closing rule was replaced by another rule. The paper uses the complete data set of completed electronic actions in 2015–17 comprising 112 million bids for 0.9 million items purchased. Exploiting the random closing rule, simple OLS models are run with a wide set of fixed effects as well as covariates capturing competition. The findings point at alternative strategies to optimize auction design: simple actions such as increasing the average and minimum length of the random phase can result in 2.8 and 0.6 percent price savings, respectively, or R$540 million and R$116 million per year; or more complex designs such as setting the length to the maximum for the random phase if there are 15 bidders or more can yield 2.6 percent or R$ 500 million a year in price savings, or doing the same if a large discount is placed within three minutes to closing can yield 1.1 percent lower prices or R$ 210 million a year in savings.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8828 APR 22, 2019
