Official statistics and big data in Latin America: Data enclosures and counter-movements

Abstract

With the rise of the data-driven economy, the state-owned sector of official statistics has been pressurised to ‘modernise’ and engage with big data. However, most of these data sources are controlled by tech corporations. We address the conflicts this brings about from a Latin American perspective through three case studies involving national statistical offices, international organisations, and the private sector. We investigate strategies for enabling data markets for official statistics and analyse how the statistical field has acted in this context. In doing so, we contribute to understanding the political economy of big data in Latin America and debates on how digitalisation encompasses the reshaping of state-business relations. Supported by secondary data and semi-structured interviews, we appraise Bourdieu's theory of fields, Marxian readings on the enclosure of commons, and Polanyi's double movement to analyse how data commodification challenges data as public goods – a fundamental principle for official statistics. The findings demonstrate that data enclosures have prevented the state's access to compiling official statistics and show that the initiatives for introducing big data in Latin American national statistical offices have involved testing data markets through public–private partnerships supported by international organisations and big tech. As a result, the statistical field has reacted to the data market with a ‘double movement’: mobilising symbolic capital such as ‘trust’ for partnering with businesses to access data and technologies and, conversely, defending the public value of data in counter-movements protective of the relative autonomy of the national statistical offices and the state's control over informational capital.