Government Analytics Using Administrative Case Data
Published in Chapter 15 in The Government Analytics Handbook: Leveraging Data to Strengthen Public Administration, edited by Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster, Washington D.C. World Bank, 2023
(with Alessandra Fenizia, and Adnan Khan)
Measuring the performance of government agencies is notoriously hard due to the lack of comparable data. At the same time, governments around the world generate an immense amount of data that detail their day-to-day operations. In this chapter we focus on three functions of government that represent the bulk of their operations and that are fairly standardized: social security programs, public procurement, and tax collection. We discuss how public sector organizations can use existing administrative case data and re-purpose them to construct objective measures of performance. We argue that it is paramount to compare cases that are homogeneous or construct a metric that captures the complexity of the case. We also argue that the metrics of government performance should capture both the volumes of services provided as well as their quality. With these considerations in mind, case data can be at the core of a diagnostic system with the potential to transform the speed and quality of public service delivery.