The Keys to Unlocking Public Payments Data.

Summary: We mechanize some of the richest yet significantly under‐utilized data resources within developed, ‘Open Data' economies. We show how it is possible to scrape, parse, clean and merge tens of thousands of disaggregated public payments datasets in an attempt to bridge the methodological gap b...

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Publicado en:Kyklos Vol. 71; no. 2; pp. 310 - 338
Autor principal: Rahal, Charles
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell May2018
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The Keys to Unlocking Public Payments Data.
      aug:
        au: Rahal, Charles
      su:
        Econometrics
        Public finance
        Big data
        Acquisition of data
        Open data movement
        Transparency in government
      sug:
        subj:
          Econometrics
          Public finance
          Public Finance Activities
          Big data
          Acquisition of data
          Open data movement
          Transparency in government
      ab: Summary: We mechanize some of the richest yet significantly under‐utilized data resources within developed, ‘Open Data' economies. We show how it is possible to scrape, parse, clean and merge tens of thousands of disaggregated public payments datasets in an attempt to bridge the methodological gap between newly available data from the administrative sphere and applications in empirical social science research. We outline techniques to unambiguously link records to various freely available institutional registers. In particular, we offer guidance on overcoming the substantial challenges of heterogeneous provision and administrative recording errors in the absence of Uniform Resource Identifiers, namely in the form of an approximate, domain‐specific ‘record‐linkage' type matching algorithm. As an illuminating example, we construct a cleaned database of 24,581,192 local government payments subject to the Local Transparency Codes which total £169.87bn in value. We overcome various challenges in a detailed examination of the procurement of services by local government from the voluntary sector: an important contemporary issue due to the rise of the ‘Big Society’ political ideology of the early 21st century. Finally, we motivate future work in this area and discuss potential international applications and practical advancements.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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