Lack of data limits crisis policy: Ingo Isphording at the Hessischer Landtag

Data infrastructure as a key to crisis resilience

Ingo Isphording, Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics, provided expert testimony in front of the main committee of the Hessischer Landtag (state parliament of Hesse) on measures to strengthen Germany’s crisis resilience and on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.

He described Germany’s data infrastructure as a key structural weakness of crisis policy. Many relevant datasets are available only with significant delays, are highly aggregated, or limited to isolated cross-sections. In addition, data are often not linkable across administrative domains, which limits their usability for research and evidence-based policymaking.

These limitations are particularly pronounced in the education sector. School closures likely entailed some of the most substantial unintended consequences of pandemic-related measures, yet the available data do not allow for a systematic assessment of these effects or for the design of targeted policy responses.

The implications are substantial. Large-scale public programmes cannot be implemented in a consistently needs-based manner nor rigorously evaluated. This constrains the development of a learning-oriented policy framework and, ultimately, the capacity to respond effectively to future crises.

International evidence shows that access to linkable research data can be reconciled with high data protection standards. In Germany, current reform initiatives—including the planned education trajectory register and the Research Data Access Act—offer concrete opportunities for improvement. Realizing this potential will depend on political willingness to treat data linkage as a prerequisite for effective crisis policy.