# **_Limitations_**

Although this research has considerable promise, there are a number of limitations which should be acknowledged, including most importantly that this analysis only claims to be an _initial_ assessment of the relationship between the variables. While it would be ideal to have more years of data—and more observations included in the data set—the analysis uses data that are _currently_ available, as OGD only started to be measured in 2012/2013. In this regard, OLS regressions are instructive in teasing out initial associations between variables; however, as more data become available, increasingly more sophisticated estimations can be performed in the future. For instance, it would be ideal to include a country fixed-effects estimation as it would demonstrate that the results are not driven by omitted variable bias, which are country-specific and do not change over time. Unfortunately, including country fixed-effects estimation at this point in time would lead to a significant loss of degrees of freedom to estimate the parameters of interest.<sup>130</sup> As such, there is an inherent trade-off between unbiasedness/consistency that would be provided by the fixed effects estimation versus being able to detect parameters using this initial OLS estimation.

Second, given the fact that OGD is a rather recent phenomenon, it is difficult to suggest a purely _causal_ relationship between variables. While a lag of nine months has been introduced between the availability of OGD statistics and changes in accountability and service provision, it is likely that these changes may take more time to materialize. Accordingly, the present analysis only purports to provide evidence of associations between variables, to help support or refute existing theoretical propositions. Relatedly, challenges exist with certain indicators and it is necessary to ensure that there are no significant issues of endogeneity and simultaneous causality. For instance, more accountable governments _may_ be more inclined to support an OGD initiative in the first place, which would reverse the causal relationship. As such, it is difficult to argue at this early stage whether OGD proceeds accountability or accountability proceeds OGD. Further quantitative and qualitative methods will need to be employed (e.g. process tracing, case study analysis, and qualitative comparative analysis) to establish a higher degree of causal certainty in the future.

Finally, there may be difficulties extrapolating the relationships demonstrated in the Sub-Saharan context to other countries, particularly upper-middle-income and high-income countries. To be sure, the analysis finds the coefficient relating OGD and accountability to be of a significant magnitude, which is due primarily to the low levels of OGD prevalent in the Sub-Saharan African region. For this reason, one cannot expect the same gains from OGD in countries with already high levels of accountably and service delivery as would be possible in country contexts with relatively low starting points.<sup>131</sup> This is precisely the reason why the present study omits other regions and focuses on a sample of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, a place where OGD has the greatest potential for improving accountability and service delivery.<sup>132</sup>

# **_Recommendations and Future Research_**

Given that this paper seeks to present an initial assessment of OGD, accountability, service delivery, as well as some of the other relevant “conditions” as gleaned from the theoretical literature, it is perhaps too early to put forth any substantive recommendations on what needs to be done to better enable OGD to reach its full potential. In its place, the initial findings presented here suggest a number of streams of future research that need to be pursued, including, _inter alia_ : (i) deeper sectoral level analysis in education and health to better understand key provision and outcome dynamics as well as their linkages to accountability

> 130 N.B. Random effects would yield similar coefficients to those obtained with OLS, but with more precise estimation of standard errors. However, they may similarly be subject to omitted variable bias as the OLS.

> 131 The logic behind this stems from the notion of marginally decreasing returns to investment, whereby investment in low-income countries yields higher returns than in more advanced economies due to the scarcity of capital; however, these initial returns quickly decline with higher levels of investment.

> 132 Overall OGD for these countries is very small (the average level of OGD is approximately 16 points on a scale of 100), so it would not be advisable to extrapolate the findings of this study to countries with higher levels of development such as Norway.

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