# An Analysis of the Supply of Open Government Data
## 5 Conclusions  
We developed a cross-section analysis to provide tests for the institutional, political, and economic determinants of cross-country differences in the supply of open government data. We consider open government data as a pure public good and, therefore, it satisfies two properties: open government data is a non-excludable good (once open government data is provided, then any person who seeks to have access can have access to that good), and it is a non-rival good (the consumption of the good by some agent does not preclude the consumption of the same good by everyone else). We used an index of the supply of open government data and estimated a cross-section regression model to analyze the cross-country differences in civil rights, transparency, quality of government, the size of the economy, the size of the population, political participation, and sociodemographic characteristics. These can explain cross-country differences in the supply of open government data. We also conducted a robustness check of our analysis by estimating five different models of regression analysis that also include dummy variables associated with geographic heterogeneity and the global distribution of income. Our analysis provided evidence that cross-country differences in governance and social institutions such as civil liberties, government transparency, and the quality of democracy are statistically significant predictors of cross-country differences in the supply of open government data. Our estimates suggest that civil rights and the transparency of government in each country have a marginal positive and statistically significant effect on the supply of open government data. In addition, our variable that captured changes in the demand of web resources--that is, penetration of users, or the proportion of Internet users over the country's population--was both positive and statistically significant in all of our estimated models. Our analysis also suggests a differentiated response of governments to changes with the demand of web resources. In particular, if there is an increase in the demand of Internet services, countries with higher qualities of democracy supply more open government data than countries with weaker democracies. This result also shows that the level of governance in each country is an important determinant of the cross-country differences in the supply of open government data. In our analysis, we included two variables that were associated with the efficiency of government intervention and with economies of scale in the provision of public goods. In this paper, we found evidence that the efficiency of government intervention and the economies of scale can also explain the cross-country differences in open government data. The efficiency of government intervention has a negative marginal effect on open government data. One possible explanation of this outcome is that an increase in the efficiency of government intervention might lead to more resources available to be spent by governments. However, those available resources might be spent on other governmental programs that might have a higher electoral impact relative to the choice of supplying more open government data, thus explaining the negative marginal effect of efficiency on the supply of open government data. In addition, the size of the population in a country was considered as a variable associated with economies of scale in the provision of public goods. Our analysis showed that there is a positive and statistically significant marginal effect of the population on the supply of open government data in all of our estimated models. As we mentioned before, the non-excludable property of open government data means that there could be economies of scale in the cost of providing open government data. This means that the per capita costs of providing a pure public good decrease as the cost of public goods is shared among more people.