Public numbers for better policies (#s4policy)
Start of the project
January 2018
Principal Investigator
Prof. Pedro Goulart
Research Team
| Researcher | Institutional Affiliation |
| Pedro Goulart | CAPP, Universidade de Lisboa |
| Catarina Grilo |
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian |
| Francisco J. Veiga |
NIPE, Universidade do Minho |
| Nuno Sobreira | CEMAPRE, Universidade de Lisboa |
| Patrícia Melo |
UECE, Universidade de Lisboa |
Summary
The age of abundance has reached the universe of data. Publicly accessible data covers a wide range of topics, enabling citizens and policymakers to better deal with policy issues, and increases the importance of data as a key instrument for public management transparency and accountability. However, data availability does not guarantee the understanding of the phenomena. This requires expert analysis to grasp the complexity of topics. This expertise is often not immediately accessible to the general public, or even to academics from other disciplines. In addition, the availability of information is sometimes geographically and/or temporally unequal, requiring levelling. Analysing and making public numbers easily available is, therefore, of paramount importance.
The team constructs and uses public numbers to promote the understanding of social and economic phenomena by citizens, policymakers and academics from other disciplines. This will allow better informed sectoral policies, for example in topics such as education, labour, transport and fisheries. Accordingly, we have constructed data series to level and even lead the understanding of child labour (Goulart and Bedi, 2017). We have also contrasted changes in unemployment to voting patterns, in order to understand the impact of labour market outcomes in the voting behaviour (Goulart and Veiga, 2016) and corrected the official estimates of fishery revenues for inflation, calling attention for the role of exchange rate depreciation (Goulart, Veiga e Grilo, 2018).