Bridging the global digital divide: A platform to advance digital development in low- and middle-income countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by George Ingram: “The world is in the midst of a fast-moving, Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as 4IR or Industry 4.0), driven by digital innovation in the use of data, information, and technology. This revolution is affecting everything from how we communicate, to where and how we work, to education and health, to politics and governance. COVID-19 has accelerated this transformation as individuals, companies, communities, and governments move to virtual engagement. We are still discovering the advantages and disadvantages of a digital world.

This paper outlines an initiative that would allow the United States, along with a range of public and private partners, to seize the opportunity to reduce the digital divide between nations and people in a way that benefits inclusive economic advancement in low- and middle-income countries, while also advancing the economic and strategic interests of the United States and its partner countries.

As life increasingly revolves around digital technologies and innovation, countries are in a race to digitalize at a speed that threatens to leave behind the less advantaged—countries and underserved groups. Data in this paper documents the scope of the digital divide. With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the world committed to reduce poverty and advance all aspects of the livelihood of nations and people. Countries that fail to progress along the path to 5G broadband cellular networks will be unable to unlock the benefits of the digital revolution and be left behind. Donors are recognizing this and offering solutions, but in a one-off, disconnected fashion. Absent a comprehensive, partnership approach, that takes advantage of the comparative advantage of each, these well-intended efforts will not aggregate to the scale and speed required by the challenge….(More)”.

A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit, alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAs for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one. President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health version, which will, the president vows, “end cancer as we know it”. His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-D) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s version is called Moonshot R&D. In Britain, a bill for an Advanced Research and Invention Agency—often referred to as UK ARPA—is making its way through parliament….(More)”.

Building and Sustaining State Data Integration Efforts: Legislation, Funding, and Strategies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Report by AISP: “The economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have heightened demand for cross-agency data capacity, as policymakers are forced to reconcile the need for expanded services with extreme fiscal constraints. In this context, integrated data systems (IDS) – also commonly referred to as data hubs, data collaboratives, or state longitudinal data systems – are a valuable resource for data-informed decision making across agencies. IDS utilize standard governance processes and legal agreements to grant authority for routine, responsible use of linked data, and institutionalize roles across partners with shared priorities.

Despite these benefits, creating and sustaining IDS remains a challenge for many states. Legislation and executive action can be powerful mechanisms to overcome this challenge and promote the use of cross-agency data for public good. Legislative and/or executive actions on data sharing can:
– Require data sharing to address a specific state policy priority
– Mandate oversight and planning activities to promote a state data sharing strategy
– Grant authority to a particular office or agency to lead cross-agency data sharing

This brief is organized in three parts. First, we offer examples of these three approaches from states that have used legislation and/or executive orders to enable data integration, as well as key considerations related to each. Second, we discuss state and federal funding opportunities that can help in implementing legislative or executive actions on data sharing and enhancing long-term sustainability of data sharing efforts. Third, we offer five foundational strategies to ensure that legislative or executive action is both ethical and effective…(More)”.

Next-generation nowcasting to improve decision making in a crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frank Gerhard, Marie-Paule Laurent, Kyriakos Spyrounakos, and Eckart Windhagen at McKinsey: “In light of the limitations of the traditional models, we recommend a modified approach to nowcasting that uses country- and industry-specific expertise to boil down the number of variables to a selected few for each geography or sector, depending on the individual economic setting. Given the specific selection of each core variable, the relationships between the variables will be relatively stable over time, even during a major crisis. Admittedly, the more variables used, the easier it is to explain an economic shift; however, using more variables also means a greater chance of a break in some of the statistical relationships, particularly in response to an exogenous shock.

This revised nowcasting model will be more flexible and robust in periods of economic stress. It will provide economically intuitive outcomes, include the consideration of complementary, high-frequency data, and offer access to economic insights that are at once timely and unique.

Nowcast for Q1 2021 shows differing recovery speeds by sector and geography.

For example, consumer spending can be estimated in different US cities by combining data such as wages from business applications and footfall from mobility trend reports. As a more complex example: eurozone capitalization rates are, at the time of the writing of this article, available only through January 2021. However, a revamped nowcasting model can estimate current capitalization rates in various European countries by employing a handful of real-time and high-frequency variables for each, such as retail confidence indicators, stock-exchange indices, price expectations, construction estimates, base-metals prices and output, and even deposits into financial institutions. The choice of variable should, of course, be guided by industry and sector experts.

Similarly, published figures for gross value added (GVA) at the sector level in Europe are available only up to the second quarter of 2020. However, by utilizing selected variables, the new approach to nowcasting can provide an estimate of GVA through the first quarter of 2021. It can also highlight the different experiences of each region and industry sector in the recent recovery. Note that the sectors reliant on in-person interactions and of a nonessential nature have been slow to recover, as have the countries more reliant on international markets (exhibit)….(More)”.

New York vs Big Tech: Lawmakers Float Data Tax in Privacy Push

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovTech article: “While New York is not the first state to propose data privacy legislation, it is the first to propose a data privacy bill that would implement a tax on big tech companies that benefit from the sale of New Yorkers’ consumer data.

Known as the Data Economy Labor Compensation and Accountability Act, the bill looks to enact a 2 percent tax on annual receipts earned off New York residents’ data. This tax and other rules and regulations aimed at safeguarding citizens’ data will be enforced by a newly created Office of Consumer Data Protection outlined in the bill.

The office would require all data controllers and processors to register annually in order to meet state compliance requirements. Failure to do so, the bill states, would result in fines.

As for the tax, all funds will be put toward improving education and closing the digital divide.

“The revenue from the tax will be put towards digital literacy, workforce redevelopment, STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), K-12 education, workforce reskilling and retraining,” said Sen. Andrew Gounardes, D-22.

As for why the bill is being proposed now, Gounardes said, “Every day, big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google capitalize on the unpaid labor of billions of people to create their products and services through targeted advertising and artificial intelligence.”…(More)”

The value of data matching for public poverty initiatives: a local voucher program example

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sarah Giest, Jose M. Miotto and Wessel Kraaij: “The recent surge of data-driven methods in social policy have created new opportunities to assess existing poverty programs. The expectation is that the combination of advanced methods and more data can calculate the effectiveness of public interventions more accurately and tailor local initiatives accordingly. Specifically, nonmonetary indicators are increasingly being measured at micro levels in order to target social exclusion in combination with poverty. However, the multidimensional character of poverty, local context, and data matching pose challenges to data-driven analyses. By linking Dutch household-level data with policy-initiative-specific data at local level, we present an explorative study on the uptake of a local poverty pass. The goal is to unravel pass usage in terms of household income and location as well as the age of users. We find that income and age play a role in whether the pass is used, and usage differs per neighborhood. With this, the paper feeds into the discourse on how to operationalize and design data matching work in the multidimensional space of poverty and nonmonetary government initiatives….(More)”.

Bridging the digital divide for underserved communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Deloitte: “…This “digital divide” was first noted more than 25 years ago as consumer communications needs shifted from landline voice to internet access. The economics of broadband spawned availability, adoption, and affordability disparities between rural and urban geographies and between lower- and higher-income segments. Today, the digital divide still presents a significant gap after more than $100 billion of infrastructure investment has been allocated by the US government over the past decade to address this issue. The current debate regarding additional funds for broadband deployment implies that further examination is warranted regarding how to get to broadband for all and achieve the resulting economic prosperity.


Quantifying the economic impact of bridging the digital divide clearly shows the criticality of broadband infrastructure to the US economy. Deloitte developed economic models to evaluate the relationship between broadband and economic growth. Our models indicate that a 10-percentage-point increase of broadband penetration in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs in 2019, or an average annual increase of 269,000 jobs. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between broadband availability and jobs and GDP growth. A 10-percentage-point increase of broadband access in 2014 would have resulted in more than 875,000 additional US jobs and $186B more in economic output in 2019. The analysis also showed that higher broadband speeds drive noticeable improvements in job growth, albeit with diminishing returns. As an example, the gain in jobs from 50 to 100 Mbps is more than the gain in jobs from 100 to 150 Mbps….(More)”.

Global inequality remotely sensed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by M. Usman Mirza et al: “Economic inequality is notoriously difficult to quantify as reliable data on household incomes are missing for most of the world. Here, we show that a proxy for inequality based on remotely sensed nighttime light data may help fill this gap. Individual households cannot be remotely sensed. However, as households tend to segregate into richer and poorer neighborhoods, the correlation between light emission and economic thriving shown in earlier studies suggests that spatial variance of remotely sensed light per person might carry a signal of economic inequality.

To test this hypothesis, we quantified Gini coefficients of the spatial variation in average nighttime light emitted per person. We found a significant relationship between the resulting light-based inequality indicator and existing estimates of net income inequality. This correlation between light-based Gini coefficients and traditional estimates exists not only across countries, but also on a smaller spatial scale comparing the 50 states within the United States. The remotely sensed character makes it possible to produce high-resolution global maps of estimated inequality. The inequality proxy is entirely independent from traditional estimates as it is based on observed light emission rather than self-reported household incomes. Both are imperfect estimates of true inequality. However, their independent nature implies that the light-based proxy could be used to constrain uncertainty in traditional estimates. More importantly, the light-based Gini maps may provide an estimate of inequality where previously no data were available at all….(More)”.

Knowledge Assets in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Draft Guidance by HM Treasury (UK): “Embracing innovation is critical to the future of the UK’s economy, society and its place in the world. However, one of the key findings of HM Treasury’s knowledge assets report published at Budget 2018, was that there was little clear strategic guidance on how to realise value from intangibles or knowledge assets such as intellectual property, research & development, and data, which are pivotal for innovation.

This new draft guidance establishes the concept of managing knowledge assets in government and the public sector. It focuses on how to identify, protect and support their exploitation to help maximise the social, economic and financial value they generate.

The guidance provided in this document is intended to advise and support organisations in scope with their knowledge asset management and, in turn, fulfil their responsibilities as set out in MPM. While the guidance clarifies best practice and provides recommendations, these should not be interpreted as additional rules. The draft guidance recommends that organisations:

  • develop a strategy for managing their knowledge assets, as part of their wider asset management strategy (a requirement of MPM)
  • appoint a Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for knowledge assets who has clear responsibility for the organisation’s knowledge asset management strategy…(More)“.

Tracking Economic Activity in Response to the COVID-19 using nighttime Lights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Roberts: “Over the last decade, nighttime lights – artificial lighting at night that is associated with human activity and can be detected by satellite sensors – have become a proxy for monitoring economic activity. To examine how the COVID-19 crisis has affected economic activity in Morocco, we calculated monthly lights estimates for both the country overall and at a sub-national level. By examining the intensity of Morocco’s lights in comparison with the quarterly GDP data at the national level, we are also able to confirm that nighttime lights are able to track movements in real economic activity for Morocco….(More)”.