Data Sharing

Masood Ishfaq: Please make public on web a list of databases that you have, in a form that can easily be accessed/downloaded locally. ALSO circulate a questionnaire to faculty asking them about all data sets/surveys that they have access to. ALSO obtain data sets from my student Uzma at IIIE and link them to your webpage with data.

PIDE has a treasure trove of data, because large numbers of diverse surveys are done here, in connection with various projects. No one has a clear idea of what is and is not available. A central data base which collects all this data in a systematic manner will be extremely useful for future researchers. In addition, we should require that submissions to PDR which do data analysis should make their data publicly available. This is becoming a common requirement at many journals because it permits replicability and verification of claimed results. This data should also be put up on our data website. It is possible to make some of this data confidential. However, it is my experience that there is huge amount of positive externalities which result from the sharing of data. This is in accordance with the Hadeeth that Knowledge is a treasure which is not lessened by the sharing of it. Masood Ishfaq, Head of ICT, has experience with collecting and organizing data sets at LUMS. We have asked him to make available all data sets already with ICT. I also request all researchers at PIDE who have carried out surveys, to provide this data to Masood Ishfaq so that he can make it available to all of PIDE.

Masood Ishfaq: please contact my student Uzma Awan who has already created a large data base at IIIE for data sharing.

Uzma Bashir <uzma.economist@gmail.com>