EITI Brief: Using Summary Data

We have developed standards and codes of best practices in areas such as data dissemination, fiscal transparency and monetary and financial policies (IMF 1997). Promoting transparency in the extractive industries is another area that the Fund has actively pursued in its technical assistance work. Under the aegis of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), a template is now available for reporting and monitoring government revenues from natural resources.

Christine Lagarde, contribution to ‘Against Corruption’, May 2016

Executive Summary

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global standard to promote the open and accountable management of oil gas and mineral resources. As of January 2017, the EITI is implemented in 51 countries.

Summary data is the EITI’s tool for collecting and publishing data from EITI Reports in a structured format. EITI Summary data is classified in accordance with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Government Finance Statistics (GFS). GFS enables cross-country and intertemporal analyses on a more granular level through a consistent categorization of revenue types. For Public Sector Finance (PSF) researchers and academics, analysis of EITI summary data offers insights into the extractive sector economies of its member countries. The summary data can therefore be used alone or in conjunction with other datasets.

This Brief introduces EITI Summary Data, the Open Data Policy and GFS classifications. It provides examples for how summary data may be used for interpreting in-country contexts of the extractive sector. The examples pay specific attention to the links between government participation in the extractive sector and the balance between revenues from ownership versus taxation.

This publication is only available in English.

This brief is the first of a two-part series, highlighting the potential of open data and introducing the EITI’s database of recently published summary data which classifies government revenue data according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Government Finance Statistics (GFS) Manual 2014 framework.

EITI Brief: Utilising summary data

Part 2 – Government returns from production value

The second brief revisits an assessment from 2013, entitled “What EITI Reports do and don’t tell us about oil deals”. Stakeholders raise a key issue when examining revenue data from EITI Reports and production and price data from other sources: Are countries are getting a ‘fair’ return. This brief utilises data for the time-period 2009 to 2013 and compares three countries: Iraq, Nigeria, and Norway. It then expands on the 2013-assessment by exploiting sub-categories of revenues and differences in tax systems, and subsequently comparing the different types of revenues received to government shares of total production values. Illustrating how newly published EITI data can be used to perform cross-country analyses with more detailed revenue data.