Usage of administrative data for the purposes of research and policy analysis

Public authorities collect a lot of data on citizens and firms in post-socialist countries. Administrative data collected by tax offices, pension funds and other government bodies in many aspects have an advantage over survey data. Using administrative data is relatively rare, but becomes a “gold standard” in evaluation of public policies worldwide. Also in Poland there is increasing experience in this matter. In 2015 the Ministry of Digitisation, which promotes the secondary use of administrative data, has been established. We also regularly use social insurance data  to follow the labour market career of university graduates.

 Usage of administrative data in Poland

The aim of the meeting which we organised on November 30 in Warsaw was to share experience in using administrative data in Poland and to promote the wider use of such data. The meeting was attended by experts from scientific community and public sector who use admin data collected by public institutions.

The meeting was chaired by Iga Magda from the Institute for Structural Research. The presentations focused on:

• experience in using the data from the unemployed register data for evaluating intervention under the Youth Guarantee – Jan Baran (Institute for Structural Research)
• the Polish Graduate Tracking System, which allows to analyse the labour market situation of graduates from different fields of study – Mikołaj Jasiński (University of Warsaw) and Agnieszka Chłoń-Domińczak (Institute for Educational Research, Warsaw School of Economics)
• the attempts to create the Integrated Analytical Platform, which will enable linking data from various admin databases – Leszek Maśniak (Ministry of Digitalisation)
• progress in combining tax and social security data for purpose of microsimulation analyses – Dominik Korniluk and Marek Skawiński (Ministry of Finance)
• experience in evaluation of ALMP measures provided by Local Labour Offices – Tomasz Gajderowicz (University of Warsaw)

Representatives of the Ministry of Development, the World Bank and the Social Insurance Institution also took part in the meeting as discussants.

Policy brief

The first meeting on the access to administrative data was organised by the Hungarian Society of Economists in Budapest on September 2017 (event website). Participants came from the Visegrad countries, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia. The policy brief builds on the conclusions of the workshop – it explores the reasons and outlines recommendations for a more effective use of administrative data in generating evidence for policy making (read).

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The meetings were parts of the project “Access to administrative data for research and policy analysis” which is realised by Hungarian Society of Economists (MKE), Budapest Institute (Hungary), Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute (CERGE-EI, Czechia), Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI, Slovakia) and our Institute. The seminar was supported by a grant from the International Visegrad Fund.