IMPROVING DATA QUALITY IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

The timely data availability is important for successful public policy development. Increasingly, public and private institutions are aware that data accessibility enables them to identify priority target groups and surveillance activities, as well as allowing researchers to identify risk groups. All democratic processes need access to data and information. In this regard, this paper aims to explore data accessibility on the web sites of the National Statistical Offices (NSOs) in Latin America countries. Based on international quality framework for statistical activities, this paper points out the strengths and weaknesses of accessibility as one of the formal dimensions of data quality. The idea is to examine the accessibility of micro data, metadata, territorial level, periodicity, and the information systems that provide insight into the evolution and recent behavior of population. Twenty NSOs were summated into the research. We highlight the data of demographic research and the improvement of data measurement. The paper starts with a brief description of the international conceptual frame of data quality and ends with the paper’s forward and a note about weaknesses in data access.

KEYWORDS: data accessibility, data quality, micro data, census, National Statistic Office, Latin America.