EDITORIAL: Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue Dr Hafeez Sheikh hits the nail on the head every time he stresses the need for timely provision of accurate data for effective policy-making. Chairing a meeting of the Monetary and Fiscal Policies Coordination Board (MFPCB) the other day, he implied once again that application of data analytics techniques would make the board more proactive in reviewing the impact of fiscal and monetary policies on economic growth, employment, investment, and so on. That, needless to say, would make ascertaining how to toggle the interest rate and adjust the direction of the economy not only far easier but also a lot more relevant. He was slightly more direct during the September meeting of the MFPCD, though, when he said that he would like to see the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) do a better job of ensuring integrity and reliability of its data. Dr Sheikh is of course a well-respected technocrat and economist and has a number of outstanding achievements to his credit, including serving as federal minister three times for three different parties in two different ministries, so there's no doubt that he knows what he's talking about. Perhaps if the PBS came under his ministry and not that of planning and economic affairs, which his predecessor and cabinet colleague Asad Umar heads, the bureau would have been made to realise the importance of data integrity by now; or perhaps that is what he was implying.

Either way, data mining is definitely the standout technology of the new century. It is for a reason that data is called the new oil. It has already transformed the way almost everything works in the developed world and indeed beyond. Producers use data to determine their scales, all sorts of outfits employ it to study consumer behaviour and adjust accordingly, it drives marketing decisions and investment across the board, and governments rely on it to study even the minutest impact of their policies. Also, as the scandal after the 2016 US presidential election and some of the troubles social media giants like Facebook faced subsequently showed so nicely, politicians have also started to play with data in a bid to influence voter decisions. Developing countries are now in a race to become as data driven as possible and as quickly as possible. They have far more limited resources than rich countries, of course, therefore they need to be far more certain about how different sectors respond to different sets of policies before they decide where to throw money around.

Data has become that much more crucial in the time of the pandemic. Countries that have the most detailed and accurate spreadsheets and pie charts about the real state of affairs are naturally able to allocate their limited resources much more efficiently than others. The finance minister is therefore very right that the PBS would have to brush up its act if we are to have half a chance of meeting the many challenges of the second wave of the coronavirus without a great deal of outside help. For we are still in a position where we do not know, beyond broad generalisations, which sectors were most affected by the shutdown after the first wave because the kind of data we get is neither prompt nor usually very accurate. Another problem is reluctance of most government organisations to share their data with analytics firms. The old excuse about sensitivity of the data is clearly not enough or most government departments and even central banks across the world would never share their statistics with outside organisations. They do it in order to identify areas of waste and excesses and quickly deal with them and to amplify successes.

It is also important to understand that this transformation, whenever it gets the green light, will not happen overnight. Data collection is one thing, and we can manage that well enough, but data processing is altogether a different process and requires the kind of expertise that never really properly developed in this country because there hasn't yet been much demand for it. Therefore, whichever ministry is in charge of PBS and whoever runs it can make a good start by getting it to adopt a more modern and data-intensive outlook than before.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020