A recent High Level Advocacy Forum on Statistics considered the need to modernize the ways that Caricom states gather and analyse data, and use it to inform development policies. Some countries already have quite advanced approaches to modern data collection. The government of Trinidad and Tobago, for example, uses statistical analyses to assess the effectiveness of policies on crime, agriculture, and healthcare as well as innovation, poverty reduction and job creation.
While the benefits of modern data collection and analysis have become increasingly noticeable in recent years, Caricom has made uneven progress in this area. Part of the reason is a lack of investment. According to one presentation at the forum in Grenada, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and Haiti spend less than a fifth (.03 per cent) of the global average (0.16 per cent) of the Official Development Assistance financing statistics.
Unfortunately discussions like these are rarely noticed by the general public, partly because relatively few of us have yet experienced the full effects of the oft-invoked ‘data revolution’. In parts of the world where big data circulate freely (especially reams of user-generated data) such benefits are commonplace. In Mexico City, for example, smartphone apps with real-time data on traffic now save drivers from millions of hours of traffic congestion each year. In Toronto websites can show you the fastest, or safest, bike route between two points in the city in a few seconds. They can even use decades of data on bike accidents to create highlights on a map, with filtres that help you see where and when fatal crashes have occurred.
The benefits of knowing where clusters of traffic accidents take place are obvious, but some of the conclusions that emerge from modern data mining are so remote from normal experience that it is hard to imagine how else they could have been noticed. A New York Times article on the Behavioural Insights Team created by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, gives one memorable example. Alex Gyani, a psychologist working for the new team, read a study which indicated that people who wrote about their experience of unemployment were twice as likely to find new jobs. Gyani persuaded a job centre in Essex to field-test the insight, and, to almost everyone’s surprise, it helped to increase job-seekers’ success rates – largely because the act of writing helped them to focus on what their immediate plans were, and to increase their level of commitment.
Britain’s “Ministry of Nudges” also had an innovative approach to tax collection notices. In 2012 the team extracted an impressive £210 million of revenue from late-payers. The key to success, it turned out, was not to admonish those who had yet to pay their taxes, but to let them know that the majority of their neighbourhood had already paid up. Other initiatives have shown that a similar nudge of this competitive instinct can change the civic engagement of large numbers of people. President Obama’s re-election, for instance, was in large part due to his campaign’s success in using letters like this to encourage voters to take part in the election.
Similarly creative approaches to governance become possible when states are willing to make long-term investments in digital infrastructure. Throughout the Caribbean there is a clear need for modernization. (Trinidad’s Central Statistical Office currently has an infrastructure devised in 1972, but is governed by a Statistics Act from 1952; Guyana’s Bureau of Statistics was established in 1957, and updated by the Bureau of Statistics Act in 1991.) By any measure our national statistical offices are ripe for reform and renewal.
