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

Sarah Giest,Jose M Miotto,Wessel Kraaij

doi:10.1017/dap.2021.2

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.

Highlights

There has been a surge in the use of data-driven methods in the social policy field
In the context of the current debate, this paper asks how data linking can help to measure the uptake of local voucher programs
This paper focuses on a local policy instrument that gives access to goods or services: the voucher program

Summary

Introduction

There has been a surge in the use of data-driven methods in the social policy field. The availability of more granular administrative and micro-data facilitates these efforts. This poses a trade-off for policymakers, since ensuring international comparability requires the use of universal definitions and harmonized methodologies, which can limit the flexibility to measure country-specific indicators (UNEC, 2017) In this context, we add to the discussion by focusing on the challenges and opportunities of linking data in order to gain insights into the uptake of a specific policy initiative: a Dutch local voucher program. Household-level data contain the number of people in the household, including the number of children, income, country of origin, and neighborhood location (so-called “buurt,” a four-digit postal code) Based on these data, we combine household-level data with policy-initiative-specific data in order to assess different uptake of the poverty pass according to household characteristics.

Local Poverty Initiatives and the Use of Data

Linking of datasets

Findings and Discussion

Concluding Remarks