Measuring the economic and social benefits and costs of public sector information online: a review of the literature and future

Governments and their administrative agencies continuously create, collect, manage, and store vast quantities of digital data and information and increasingly disseminate much of it online. The data and information that are produced by the public sector bodies include, for example, geographic and meteorological data, company registers, financial reports, public health information, social and economic statistics, legislation and judicial proceedings, and many other kinds of information, collectively referred to as public sector information (PSI).

Rapidly advancing information and communication technologies (ICT) have begun to fundamentally transform all information industries, including in the public sector, over the past two decades. These technologies have improved the information management potential within the public sector and made the dissemination of information cheaper and easier. By leveraging the opportunities of ICTs, PSI has thus increasingly been used beyond its initial purposes. Economic and social value is derived from PSI directly as an exploitable public good for products and services, and indirectly as a basis for improving efficiencies in decision making.

In many countries, especially within the OECD, PSI is used broadly by other public-sector organizations, by private-sector companies in general (as information users), by information industry firms in particular (as re-users through their value-added information products and services), by research communities, and by individual users in society (e.g., for health and educational purposes). In many cases, the information is used beyond national borders as a global public good.

At the same time, governments have been developing or revising their policies concerning access to and use of PSI through legislative and regulatory (administrative) mechanisms. Some of these policies extend across the entire government, while others are specific to certain types of information or specific agencies within the government. Within the OECD countries, and indeed throughout the world, there are different approaches and levels of access to and use of PSI. Access and use policies vary from fully open to restricted, freely available or with various access fee charges, and ranging from unrestricted use to a broad range of use restrictions. Moreover, the access and use policies and conditions vary not only across national governments, but also in many cases within each country at the state and local levels. Also, some governments have initiatives for promoting the use of the Internet for disseminating their information products to the public.

In general, there is a growing recognition by both the public and private sectors of the importance of digital networks to the economy and society, and the key role that PSI and government policies governing such information play. Despite this recognition, there is surprisingly a poor understanding of how PSI is actually used, especially by individual users, its economic and social value and impact, and of the effects of different access and use policies on this value and impact. There is a concomitant lack of comprehensive or detailed empirical data about the users and effects of PSI disseminated on the Internet, and of the different policy approaches to the dissemination of PSI.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.