Article by Stefaan Verhulst: “Official statistics have long served as the bedrock of evidence-based policymaking in the United States, but the ground beneath them is shifting. Survey response rates are falling; collection costs are rising; privacy concerns are mounting; and public trust in government information has eroded just as the questions policymakers must answer—about digital inclusion, financial resilience, climate impacts, mobility, and economic opportunity—have grown more complex and time-sensitive. The statistical systems built for a slower, more uniform economy were never designed to keep pace with a society this dynamic.
Out of this tension has come a quiet but consequential shift: the rise of the re-use of non-traditional data, or NTD. Generated continuously through commercial transactions, digital platforms, connected devices, satellites, financial institutions, mobility services, and online interactions, this data was never collected with statistical production in mind. Yet when it is responsibly governed and woven together with surveys, censuses, and administrative records, it gives statistical agencies something they have always wanted but rarely had: a near-continuous, granular window into economic and social life. The promise is not that non-traditional data will replace official statistics but that it will make them faster, cheaper, and more relevant—while asking less of the public in the process.
As in other countries, the United States has become a testing ground for this hybrid approach. Federal statistical agencies — the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis among them — have increasingly partnered with universities, nonprofits, philanthropies, and private companies to explore what non-traditional data can offer. Outside government, organizations such as Opportunity Insights, the JP MorganChase Institute, Microsoft Research, Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth, and Meta’s Data for Good program have shown that privately held, passively generated data can produce policy-relevant indicators that official statistics alone cannot.
What emerges from these efforts is not competition between data sources but complementarity. Surveys still offer representativeness (“ground truth”) and rich context; administrative records still offer comprehensive population coverage; and non-traditional data contributes something that is often limited in both: timeliness, granularity, and the ability to see change as it happens rather than months later.
The examples that follow provide a snapshot of current experimentation in the United States. They are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to illustrate the diversity of approaches through which non-traditional data is being integrated with surveys, censuses, and administrative records to strengthen official statistics and inform public decision-making…(More)”.
