Improving Government Policy Making and Needs-Based Delivery of Services: Innovative Techniques to Enhance Administrative Data by Adding Socioeconomic Status

There is an urgent need to better utilise our administrative data to answer questions about whether there are socio-economic differences in usage of key social services or in outcomes. It has been difficult in the past for governments to analyse such issues because information about the socio-economic characteristics of the users of government services is typically not collected as part of the routine administration of programs such as education and health. This proposal aims to fill a critical gap by testing and applying a new method for blending small area information about socio-economic status from the Census with administrative data.