It is a gathering of 300 ‘sexy’ specialists at Ryerson University who, until recently, were known as ‘geeks’. However, thanks to Google’s Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, who calls data scientists and statisticians the ones holding the ‘sexy job’, the spotlight is now on data and those who could analyse it.

Data librarians, archivists and statisticians working for leading universities from across the world gathered at Ryerson University for the 40th iAssist conference. This year’s theme is on aligning data and research infrastructure.

In a world awash with data, cheap and ubiquitous computing, and advanced algorithms, analytics have become critical for the success of businesses and governments. In a marketplace where analytics define the competitive advantage, data is the new gold and data scientists are the new golden boys and girls.

The emergence of evidence-based planning has put evidence, i.e. data in the centre. From health sciences to economic development, policymakers and strategists rely on data to carve out their strategies. Smart firms are investing heavily in hiring dozens of skilled statisticians and data scientists. Smart governments are investing in collecting relevant data and liberating it for use by researchers.

Developing countries like Pakistan should consider investing in the infrastructure that promotes data collection, free dissemination, and analysis. Setting up a national data bank as the nation’s data archiving and dissemination body could be the first step towards evidence-based planning for economic and social development.

iAssist is an international outfit of data specialists who support research and learning in social sciences at academic institutions, government agencies, research centres, and statistical agencies. The 40th annual conference is being hosted jointly by Toronto’s three universities: Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and York University. The conference’s agenda reflects the cutting edge in data science where sessions are devoted to the best practices in data archiving and dissemination, and workshops on data visualisation and analytics.

The ready availability of data determines what gets researched by the world’s very best researchers. Freely available data improves the likelihood of a phenomenon, a people, or an economy, being the focus of research. On the other hand, data secrecy could mean a lack of interest by bright researchers who may gravitate to studying behavior, challenges, and phenomenon that are well-documented with rich data sets.

The Economist magazine systematically analysed 76,000 articles published in the world’s leading economics journals to determine what countries received the most interest by leading researchers.

The result was hardly a surprise. An overwhelming majority of papers published in the leading academic journals were focused on the United States (see graph below). “There were more papers focused on the United States than on Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa combined.”

Source: The Economist, January 2014

The question is why the United States attracts such attention by researchers. Even India, despite having a very large number of leading expatriate economists, such as Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate), Kaushik Basu (the World Bank), and Raghuram Rajan (formerly the IMF), hardly generated any scholarship in the leading journals. “The American Economic Review, the holy grail for many academics, published one paper on India, by some measures the world’s third-largest economy, every two years,” wrote The Economist.

One could explain this US-centric publication frenzy for two reasons. The one obvious culprit perhaps is the bias of the editorial boards dominated by US-based academics who often see little value in scholarship that does not address challenges faced by the American economy.

The other reason is the ready availability of ‘troves of good data’ on the US economy that makes it easier to study the US economy than that of others. Even star Canadian researchers in economics and management overlook Canada and focus on the US in their high-profile academic publications. One big reason is the lack of readily available data on Canada.

What should Pakistan do?

Pakistan faces a huge data shortage for two reasons.

First, good quality data is not collected on large scale on a regular basis. Even holding of regular Census, a nation’s primary data collection responsibility, has failed in Pakistan.

Since the late 19th century, decennial Census was held throughout British India regularly. This tradition continued in Pakistan after the independence in 1947, but broke down completely in 1998, the year the last Census was held.

Even when surveys are conducted in Pakistan, as is the case with the Household Integrated Economic Survey, the data is kept under lock and key and is made available only to government employees, who seldom show any interest, and foreign consultants, who seldom share their findings.

At the same time, data collected by foreign consultants, who are reimbursed by the government, is smuggled out of Pakistan without a trace. State agencies, such as NADRA and the Federal Bureau of Statistics, withhold data from researchers and academics, who are expected to pay huge sums to gain access to the prized data sets.

The status quo does not help with the research needs of the country. A new transparent and open regime is needed to act as the data clearing house for all data collected by the federal, provincial, and other governments and their agencies. The new data bank should be set up by the federal government through an Act of the Parliament to have the mandate to archive and disseminate all existing socio-economic data sets sitting with various agencies. The data should be made available without charge to any researcher or organisation that registers with the Data Bank. This would engage a large number of researchers interested in exploring the socio-economic challenges facing Pakistan.

The US Census Bureau and several other leading statistical agencies have initiated data liberation drives to facilitate ready access to data.

Agencies like the World Bank have done the same in the recent past.

Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments should realise the wisdom of data liberation and invest in the data bank sooner than later.