Governments across the world make thousands of personnel management decisions, procure millions of goods and services, and execute billions of processes each day. They are data rich.  And yet, there is little systematic practice to-date which capitalises on this data to make public administrations work better. This means that governments are missing out on data insights to save billions in procurement expenditures, recruit better talent into government, and identify sources of corruption, to name just a few.

The Government Analytics Handbook seeks to change that. It presents frontier evidence and practitioner insights on how to leverage data to make governments work better. Covering a range of microdata sources—such as administrative data and public servant surveys—as well as tools and resources for undertaking the analytics, it transforms the ability of governments to take a data-informed approach to diagnose and improve how public organisations work.

Key messages:

• Firms are capitalising on innovations in data science at an unprecedented scale to improve their internal operations, but many governments are lacking behind.
• A wealth of approaches and data sources are available to governments for analytics to identify evidence-based improvements.
• Frontier government analytics integrates different data sources and makes insights accessible to managers across government organisations.