some suggestions for progress based on observations made by the research team. Section 4 examines existing indicators measuring data accessibility and discusses results from section 3 <mark>visà-vis</mark> the Open Data Access Indicator (ODIN). Section 5 presents the new microdata access indicator for MENA while section 6 concludes.

# 2. <mark>Transparency and trust in statistics</mark>

<mark>Public trust in official statistics is anchored in professional independence and impartiality of statisticians, their use of scientific methods and equal access for all to official statistical information. T</mark> o operationalize these ideas, the international statistics community has adopted a professional code comprising of ten principles, the _Fundamental Principle of Official Statistics,_ and a set of “ _Good Practices_ ”. Together they emphasize accessibility, impartiality, transparency, accuracy, relevance, cost-effectiveness, confidentiality, professionalism, coordination, and cooperation. At times, the Principles and Practices have conflicting requirements. Confidentiality, for instance, captured in Principle no 6 necessitates measures to <mark>prevent the direct or indirect disclosure of data on persons, households, businesses, and other individual respondents. As this could be interpreted as a prohibition to release source data, statisticians also commit themselves to “</mark> _<mark>a</mark> framework describing methods and procedures to provide sets of anonymous micro-data for further analysis by bona fide researchers, maintaining the requirements of confidentiality_ .”<sup>4</sup> In this way the Good Practices forge a compromise between confidentiality on the one hand, and transparency and access on the other.

Access to microdata is typically offered in two ways. Some agencies make anonymized microdata directly available to the public. India’s statistical agency for instance, the <mark>Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation</mark> MOSPI, has a long history of running national sample surveys dating back to the 1950s when they were initiated by Professor <mark>Mahalanobis, the father of Indian statistics, and of publicly releasing the anonymized microdata. On MOSPI’s website microdata sets are available for download dating back to as far as 1975. Other known sources of downloadable microdata sets are the World Bank’s (WBs) microdata library,</mark><sup>5</sup> <mark>the DHS</mark><sup>6</sup> <mark>and MICS</mark><sup>7</sup> <mark>websites, the labor force surveys curated by the ILO,</mark><sup>8</sup> <mark>and IPUMS</mark><sup>9</sup> <mark>which publishes (samples of) population censuses.</mark> Others, like EUROSTAT, make microdata available in two formats: Public and Scientific Use Files. The Public Use Files (PUFs) can be downloaded immediately. They are subsamples of the Scientific Use Files (SUFs) which allow researchers to explore data sets and build their code. These PUFs cannot be used for publications. For this the SUF files are needed. SUF files are also made

> 4 See https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/FP-Rev2013-E.pdf

> 5 https://microdata.worldbank.org/

> 6 https://www.dhsprogram.com/

> 7 https://mics.unicef.org/surveys

> 8 https://www.ilo.org/surveyLib/index.php/catalog/LFS/about

> 9 https://usa.ipums.org/usa/

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