From FT.com June 7, 2013

‘Finding government statistics is not easy. Both expert users and occasional users struggle to navigate their way through the multiple places in which statistics are published.’

UK House of Commons public administration select committee report, May 2013

How hard can it be to find a few statistics? And since when is this a matter for a parliamentary committee?You’ve obviously never tried to use the Office for National Statistics website. Try a simple-sounding query – such as what households are currently spending in a week, or retail price inflation for the past 50 years – and you are highly unlikely to get anywhere using the search window. It’s like Google on an acid trip, throwing several thousand random results at you.

It can’t be that hard.

I recently sat down with one of the UK’s finest economic journalists, Evan Davis of the BBC, and we tried to get the results we wanted either through the search window or by trying to second-guess the tormented mind of the person who constructed the branches of the database’s hierarchy. It was hopeless. Even when Mr Davis used his expertise to shortcut the process, we found ourselves thwarted at every turn. (As an aside, Google delivered the correct result in seconds.)

I am sure Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, would not be defeated
so easily.

Perhaps not, but Mr Giles testified to the public administration committee and took the trouble to run through, step by step, just how difficult it would be to find the answer to a simple, practical statistical question – such as whether unemployment today is lower or higher than it was in the mid-1990s. For an expert user, who knows that the relevant code for the data in question is MGSX, finding an answer to that question is slow and awkward. For a more typical user, finding an answer might be impossible.

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Posted in Data |
From Undercover Economist May 24, 2013

Data visualisation is the latest fashion in numerate journalism, albeit one that harks back to the likes of Florence Nightingale. Data visualisation creates powerful, elegant images from complex data. It’s like good prose: a pleasure to experience and a force for good in the right hands, but also seductive and potentially deceptive. Because we have less experience of data visualisation than of rhetoric, we are naive, and allow ourselves to be dazzled. Too much data visualisation is the statistical equivalent of dazzle camouflage: striking looks grab our attention but either fail to convey useful information or actively misdirect us.

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Posted in Damned lies and statistics, Data, Mapping |
From FT.com May 22, 2013

Officials who spent their days under a mango tree falsifying forms. Villagers who were reachable only by canoe or whose first inclination was to attack the census takers. Such suspicion of government that businesses refused to provide data. More than 200 languages, 160m people, 36 states and 774 local government areas.

These were among the challenges that greeted Yemi Kale when he was appointed Nigeria’s statistician-general two years ago – and some of the reasons why his quest to provide more accurate gross domestic product figures for Africa’s second-largest economy are taking so long.

The National Bureau of Statisticshas been working since early 2012 to gather enough data to rebase Nigeria’s GDP, which is at present measured against output and consumption patterns from 1990, when booming sectors like mobile telecommunications and the “Nollywood” film industry did not exist. Most developed countries change their calculations every five years.Analysts expect that Nigeria’s economy, which the NBS put at $258bn in 2012, will see a significant upward revision after rebasing, as happened in Ghana in 2010, when GDP grew by 60 per cent following a similar exercise. Renaissance Capital said in a report this month it expected a 40 per cent increase Nigeria’s economy, which would measure it at $361bn, using current figures, close to that of South Africa’s, which is estimated at $385bn.

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Posted in Data |
From FT.com May 8, 2013

Professors Reinhart and Rogoff were embarrassed by a spreadsheet gaffe. Now statisticians within the Japanese government are smarting, after a private-sector economist pointed out errors that led them to overstate weakness in the economy during the fourth quarter last year.

In an announcement to the Japanese press club on Tuesday evening, the Cabinet Office said that a miscalculation of the value of trade in services between October and December meant that nominal gross domestic product was reported as shrinking by 0.3 per cent, rather than the true figure of 0.1 per cent.

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Posted in Data |

Economic possibilities in demographics

April 19, 2013 4:59 pm by FT

Guest post by Paul Hodges

The G20 group represents 79 per cent of global GDP. But when it comes to demographics, you can split its membership into three quite distinct groups.

This shows each country in terms of GDP per capita and median population age, with its economy’s size depicted by the bubble:

  • Rich but old. These are wealthy western countries, with GDP per capita around $40,000 and median population age of 40 years
  • Poor but young. These are emerging economies, with GDP per capita around $10,000 and median population ages of 25 to 30 years
  • Poor and ageing. This group contains just China and Russia, who have GDP per capita around $10,000 but median population ages approaching 40 years

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Tags:
Posted in Data, Statistics |

Start-ups tap into open data

March 18, 2013 5:46 pm by FT

Can businesses be based on bus timetables and weather reports? Maija Palmer visits the Open Data Institute to learn how entrepreneurs are exploiting valuable government data.

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Posted in Data, UK |
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