Stefaan Verhulst

OECD article: “Value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax applied at each stage of the supply chain whenever value is added to goods or services. Businesses collect and remit VAT. The VAT data that are collected represent a breakthrough in studying production networks because they capture actual transactions between firms at an unprecedented level of detail. Unlike traditional business surveys or administrative data that might tell us about a firm’s size or industry, VAT records show us who does business with whom and for how much.

This data is particularly valuable because of its comprehensive coverage. In Estonia, for example, all VAT-registered businesses must report transactions above €1,000 per month, creating an almost complete picture of significant business relationships in the economy.

At least 15 countries now have such data available, including Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Estonia, and Italy. This growing availability creates opportunities for cross-country comparison and broader economic insights…(More)”.

Article by Karen Zraick: “Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing.

That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding that had been promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

The Agriculture Department referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, based in Binghamton; the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York; and the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The latter two groups relied on the department website for their research and advocacy, the lawsuit said.

Peter Lehner, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said the pages being purged were crucial for farmers facing risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The websites had contained information about how to mitigate dangers and adopt new agricultural techniques and strategies. Long-term weather data and trends are valuable in the agriculture industry for planning, research and business strategy.

“You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said…(More)”.

Report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change: “The United Kingdom should lead the world in artificial-intelligence-driven innovation, research and data-enabled public services. It has the data, the institutions and the expertise to set the global standard. But without the right infrastructure, these advantages are being wasted.

The UK’s data infrastructure, like that of every nation, is built around outdated assumptions about how data create value. It is fragmented and unfit for purpose. Public-sector data are locked in silos, access is slow and inconsistent, and there is no system to connect and use these data effectively, or any framework for deciding what additional data would be most valuable to collect given AI’s capabilities.

As a result, research is stalled, AI adoption is held back, and the government struggles to plan services, target support and respond to emerging challenges. This affects everything from developing new treatments to improving transport, tackling crime and ensuring economic policies help those who need them. While some countries are making progress in treating existing data as strategic assets, none have truly reimagined data infrastructure for an AI-enabled future…(More)”

Paper by Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger: “…International harmonization of regulation is the right strategy when the appropriate regulatory ends and means are sufficiently clear to reap efficiencies of scale and scope. When this is not the case, a push for efficiency through uniformity is premature and may lead to a suboptimal regulatory lock-in: the establishment of a rule framework that is either inefficient in the use of its means to reach the intended goal, or furthers the wrong goal, or both.

A century ago, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggested that companies have two distinct strategies to achieve success. The first is to employ economies of scale and scope to lower their cost. It’s essentially a push for improved efficiency. The other strategy is to invent a new product (or production process) that may not, at least initially, be hugely efficient, but is nevertheless advantageous because demand for the new product is price inelastic. For Schumpeter this was the essence of innovation. But, as Schumpeter also argued, innovation is not a simple, linear, and predictable process. Often, it happens in fits and starts, and can’t be easily commandeered or engineered.

As innovation is hard to foresee and plan, the best way to facilitate it is to enable a wide variety of different approaches and solutions. Public policies in many countries to foster startups and entrepreneurship stems from this view. Take, for instance, the policy of regulatory sandboxing, i.e. the idea that for a limited time certain sectors should not or only lightly be regulated…(More)”.

Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.

There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.

In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:

• Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
• This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.

Article by Steve Lohr: “John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence.

The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes.

To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days.

“I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.

That sentiment is increasingly common among software developers, who are at the forefront of adopting A.I. agents, assistant programs tailored to help employees do their jobs in fields including customer service and manufacturing. The rapid improvement of the technology has been accompanied by dire warnings that A.I. could soon automate away millions of jobs — and software developers have been singled out as prime targets.

But the outlook for software developers is more likely evolution than extinction, according to experienced software engineers, industry analysts and academics. For decades, better tools have automated some coding tasks, but the demand for software and the people who make it has only increased.

A.I., they say, will accelerate that trend and level up the art and craft of software design.

“The skills software developers need will change significantly, but A.I. will not eliminate the need for them,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “Not anytime soon anyway.”

The outlook for software engineers offers a window into the impact that generative A.I. — the kind behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is likely to have on knowledge workers across the economy, from doctors and lawyers to marketing managers and financial analysts. Predictions about the technology’s consequences vary widely, from wiping out whole swaths of the work force to hyper-charging productivity as an elixir for economic growth…(More)”.

Design for Social Impact: “Too many non-profits and funders still roll into communities with a clipboard and a mission to document everything “missing.”

Needs assessments have become a default tool for diagnosing deficits, reinforcing a saviour mentality where outsiders decide what’s broken and needs fixing.

I’ve sat in meetings where non-profits present lists of what communities lack:

• “Youth don’t have leadership skills”
• “Parents don’t value education”
• “Grassroots organisations don’t have capacity”

The subtext? “They need us.”

And because funding is tied to these narratives of scarcity, organisations learn to describe themselves in the language of need rather than strength—because that’s what gets funded…Now, I’m not saying that organisations or funders should never ask people what their needs are. The key issue is how needs assessments are framed and used. Too often, they use extractive “data” collection methodologies and reinforce top-down, deficit-based narratives, where communities are defined primarily by what they lack rather than what they bring.

Starting with what’s already working (asset mapping) and then identifying what’s needed to strengthen and expand those assets is different from leading with gaps, which can frame communities as passive recipients rather than active problem-solvers.

Arguably, a balanced synergy between assessing needs and asset mapping can be powerful—so long as the process centres on community agency, self-determination, and long-term sustainability rather than diagnosing problems for external intervention.

Also, asset-based mapping to me does not mean that you swoop in with the same clipboard and demand people document their strengths…(More)”.

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.

Paper by Ankush Reddy Sugureddy: “The quality of data becomes an essential component for the success of an organisation in a world that is largely influenced by data, where data analytics is becoming increasingly popular in the process of informing strategic decisions. The failure to improve the quality of the data can lead to undesirable outcomes such as poor decisions, ineffective strategies, dysfunctional operations, lost commercial prospects, and abrasion of the consumer. In the process of organisations shifting their focus towards transformative methods such as generative artificial intelligence, several use cases may emerge that have the potential to aid the improvement of data quality. Streamlining procedures such as data classification, metadata management, and policy enforcement can be accomplished by the incorporation of generative artificial intelligence into data governance frameworks. This, in turn, reduces the workload of human data stewards and minimises the possibility of human error. In order to ensure compliance with legal standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), generative artificial intelligence may analyse enormous datasets by utilising machine learning algorithms to discover patterns, inconsistencies, and compliance issues…(More)”.

Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.

To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.

What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.

Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.