March 21st: Today's a holiday here, not because it's good Friday, but because it's census day. Imagine how excited folks in the US would be if they got a day off for this!The day, though, underscores the importance of data and the poor data environment in which the Government of Liberia, and its partners, operates.A few months ago, I was meeting with a donor who said, essentially, "I'm concerned. This government's been in power 2 years and unemployment is still 85%!" Ignoring methodological concerns for the moment (are informal petty traders unemployed? What about subsistence farmers?) the simple fact of the matter is that this, as with many oft-quoted government statistics, is entirely a fabrication. Basically, if you got the right few people in the room once a month, you could change the official rate, based on no data whatsoever.Yet look at those famous Penn tables, or check out the CIA world factbook, and you're left to believe that there are solid numbers everywhere.We all know numbers can be used to lie, to mislead. But sometimes, having any numbers at all is misleading. It's led me to start wondering: What purpose should numbers - everything from GDP to growth rate - serve? It seems to me that the answer to this is to inform planning - by government, by partners, by those looking to use your country in a regression analysis (hopefully not involving probits, I still don't understand those) to figure out the impact of x on y cross-country. None of these aims is served by having false numbers - what is served, I guess, is the statistician's desire for one less blank, the analyst's desire for a more complete data set that will get that 5% CI '**' after results, or the GoL or on-the-ground partner's desire for one less awkward explanation when someone from outside, or the home office, asks a question like "How many people are unemployed?" Today, though, is another step towards building knowledge, towards information. After collecting a good deal of data in the run-up to the PRS, the census should give us solid answers to questions like "How many Liberians are there in Liberia?" We're all looking forward to that as a first step to having good answers to questions, and building up the knowledge, and data, that will allow for better planning for the government and donors alike.In the meantime, let's start pushing the US gov't for a census holiday...
