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Luxembourg, 26-27 October 2006

Nadim Ahmad, Statistics Directorate, OECD

OECD Conference: Assessing the Feasibility of Micro-Data Access

Discussion Session – The Feasibility Study

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Options (I and II) - Indicators

Is it feasible to produce new suites of indicators? In which areas?

If an average can be shown is it true that other descriptive statistics related to it can be shown, for example Var?

What about Co-variances and Regression Coefficients?

How can we proceed?

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Options (III) - Bilateral Projects

How feasible are these? The beauty of international access is the facilitation of international comparisons.

Are the resource/travel/logistic costs to great to render this approach impractical.

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Options (IV) – Remote Access

E-mail based systems versus Automatic. Are the latter possible. Can algorithms be designed to make them work (couple with creation of trusted and educated user network and penalties)?

Are different approaches needed for different datasets?

What are the costs involved (for NSOs) in creating common datasets?

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Options (V) – Transmission of Micro-Data

How many countries will be able to provide anonymised or confidentialised (Public-Use files)?

And in what areas? Social vs Economic Will it be possible to harmonise formats, meta-data

and confidentiality rules?

Is the option of using privately sourced data more practical? Despite the risks to NSOs. Are, and how, these sources used in your office?

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Developing Governance Rules

Pre-requisites: – No attempt made to identify individual responses– Access restricted to vetted, trained and trusted OECD

Users, who are able to demonstrate a need for micro-data access citing the potential impact on policy and benefits to micro-data access providers.

– Recognition of potential for access-removal if breach occurs– Dedicated OECD research centre team responsible for

secondary vetting of (trusted) users outputs.– No access possible outside list of vetted OECD users. – Widespread dissemination of results

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Developing Confidentiality Rules

No statistic with <3? 5? 10? etc observations

Majority rules? What % constitutes disclosure?

Maximum number of variables?

Samples?

Historic data