When Is There Enough Data to Create a Global Statistic ?
To monitor progress toward global goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals, global statistics are needed. Yet cross-country data sets are rarely truly global, creating a trade-off for producers of global statistics: the lower is the data cov...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099715305052234754/IDU05d45ca360cddd044880828c072587f9a9c4f http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37413 |
| Summary: | To monitor progress toward global
goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals, global
statistics are needed. Yet cross-country data sets are
rarely truly global, creating a trade-off for producers of
global statistics: the lower is the data coverage threshold
for disseminating global statistics, the more statistics can
be made available, but the lower is the accuracy of these
statistics. This paper quantifies the availability-accuracy
trade-off by running more than 10 million simulations on the
World Development Indicators. It shows that if the fraction
of the world’s population for which data are lacking is x,
then the global value will on expectation be off by 0.37*x
standard deviation, and it could be off by as much as x
standard deviations. The paper shows the robustness of this
result to various assumptions and provides recommendations
on when there is enough data to create global statistics.
Although the decision will be context specific, in a
baseline scenario, it is suggested not to create global
statistics when there are data for less than half of the
world’s population. |
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