4. Public availability of microdata in the Middle East and North Africa

Because of the low frequency of surveys, two-thirds of the Middle East and North Africa’s population are covered by a recent consumption survey, about 56 percent by a recent labor force survey, one-third by a recent demographic and health survey, and less than 10 percent by a recent establishment survey.

4. Public availability of microdata in the Middle East and North Africa

It is one thing to collect microdata, it is another to make the data, once collected, available to the public. Whether to publicly release microdata requires resolving an apparent conflict between the 10 Fundamental Principle of Official Statistics to which every statistician adheres and that emphasize data accessibility, impartiality, transparency, accuracy, relevance, cost-effectiveness, confidentiality, professionalism, coordination, and cooperation. The principles of accessibility, impartiality, transparency, and cost-effectiveness support public release of microdata. Moreover, once data are made available, public feedback enhances its relevance and accuracy. Still, public release seems to conflict with the principle of the confidentiality of data, which prevents direct or indirect disclosure of data on persons, households, businesses, and other individual respondents. To overcome this conflict, good practices guide statisticians. With respect to public release of microdata, statisticians follow “a framework describing methods and procedures to provide sets of anonymous microdata for further analysis by bona fide researchers, maintaining the requirements of confidentiality.”3

This framework tends to be operationalized in one of two ways. Some agencies make anonymized microdata directly available to the public. Sources of downloadable microdata sets include the World Bank microdata library; the Demographic and Health Survey and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey websites; the labor force surveys curated by the International Labor Organization; and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, which publishes (samples of) population censuses. Others, such as Eurostat, make microdata available in two formats: public and scientific use. Public use files (PUFs) can be downloaded immediately. They are subsamples of scientific use files (SUFs), which allow researchers to explore data sets and build their code. PUFs cannot be used for publications, for which SUF files are needed. SUFs are made available but require a stricter two-step application process in which a researcher’s organization must be recognized as a research entity (e.g., university, research institution or research department in a public administration, bank, statistical institute), after which the researcher can submit an application to receive the full microdata set.

Having established that statistical principles support public release of microdata, how does the Middle East and North Africa fare? To explore this, Ekhator-Mobayode and Hoogeveen (2021) examined the accessibility of the microdata sets that NSO websites indicated that they had (reported in Tables 1 and 2). When the research is limited to data accessible on NSO websites, of 55 microdata sets (21 censuses, 34 surveys), 11 are publicly accessible, and another nine can be accessed through international repositories that the World Bank, International Household Survey Network, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, and Eurostat maintain or from the Demographic and Health Survey and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey websites (Figure 5). Only five of the data sets that can be accessed through NSO websites can be downloaded immediately: the 2018–19 Lebanon Labor Force and Household Conditions Survey; the 2014 Morocco National Survey on Household Consumption and Expenditures; the 2015 Tunisia national survey on budget, consumption, and household living standards; the 2017 Tunisia National Population and Employment Survey; and a subset of the 2014 population census microdata for Morocco. All others require prior registration.

3 Principles Governing International Statistical Activities, accessed May 2, 2022, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/statorg/Principles_stat_activities/principles_stat_activities.asp