S7 Ep5: Microdata in Europe

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: The episode explains why accessible microdata is essential for evaluating policy, improving competitiveness, and expanding economic research in Europe. Filippo Di Mauro and Ugo Panizza argue that the main barrier is not data scarcity but fragmented, costly, and unequal access, and they describe progress on a Europe-wide Microdata Infrastructure (MDI) designed to standardize access, lower costs, and eventually use AI to manage requests and workflows.

Main Topics: Why microdata matters for policy evaluation (Priority: 5/5): The guests argue that household-, firm-, and individual-level data are crucial to assess whether major policies like Next Generation EU actually work and which interventions are most effective. Access barriers, not just data shortages (Priority: 5/5): They emphasize that in most cases the problem is not that data do not exist, but that they are locked away, expensive, or difficult to access due to legal and institutional hurdles. Cross-country inequality in Europe (Priority: 5/5): The discussion highlights deep variation across European countries in data access rules, confidentiality interpretation, and who is allowed to use national administrative data. Cost, fairness, and research inequality (Priority: 4/5): Commercial pricing and selective access create a system where wealthy institutions and insiders can do better research than smaller or poorer institutions. Progress on the Microdata Infrastructure (MDI) (Priority: 5/5): They report concrete advances: EU funding, staff hired, bilateral agreements with statistical offices, and a growing number of participating countries. AI as a future enabler (Priority: 3/5): AI is presented as a tool that could digitize historical archives, cluster research requests, and make the eventual microdata system more efficient. CEPR as a coordinating network (Priority: 4/5): CEPR is framed as a convener that can inform researchers and policymakers, build consensus, and support better funding and access regimes.

Key Arguments: Microdata is a public good because it enables evaluation of public policies and improves the allocation of scarce public resources. Most research questions already have relevant data somewhere; the challenge is access, cost, and legal fragmentation rather than total absence of data. Europe’s country-by-country access regime is incompatible with the idea of a common market and blocks efficient cross-country research. Commercial datasets are often inferior to national statistical office data, yet researchers resort to them because official data are harder to obtain. Public institutions should provide data at cost or free, while private firms should at least offer transparent academic pricing or consortium agreements. A standardized access process, like the French and Dutch models, should become the European norm. The MDI aims to harmonize data outputs across countries so researchers can submit code and receive comparable results without direct raw-data access. AI could eventually reduce administrative burden and unlock historical data through digitization and automated transcription.

Data Points: Next Generation EU investment: more than 800 billion - Used as an example of a major policy program that requires microdata for evaluation MDI participating countries: 5 countries already set up - Current progress on the Microdata Infrastructure Expected additional countries: a few more to come; Italy in a few days, Malta in a few weeks - Near-term expansion of the MDI EU support mechanism: DG Reform technical support intervention mechanism - Source of financing used to build the MDI team and infrastructure Historical/indicator dataset size: 300 to 400 indicators - Description of the fixed public dataset built by Component Data Set Commercial data example price: half a million dollars - Illustrative cost quoted for access to some privately sold datasets Policy timing reference: report due in June - Mario Draghi’s competitiveness report mentioned as an upcoming policy milestone

Pivotal Quotes: "Microdata, that's collected at the level of a household, a firm, or even an individual, is extraordinarily valuable for researchers who are interested in how policy works." — Tim Phillips: Opening framing of why the topic matters "In most cases, it's just that it's not available. Of course, we can think for some problems which we don't have data, but for almost every question I can think of, I think there are data around." — Ugo Panizza: Argument that access is the main bottleneck, not data existence "We want to have this transparent as it is in the France and Netherlands. Again, this is a template that Europe should follow." — Filippo Di Mauro: Call for standardized and transparent access procedures across Europe

Implications: If Europe standardizes microdata access, research quality, policy evaluation, and cross-country comparability will improve, especially for competitiveness and industrial policy. The MDI could also reduce inequality between institutions and make administrative data far more usable.