The Districts That Vanished: Administrative Reorganisation and the Silent Unbalancing of a National Panel
Keywords:
panel construction, administrative data, survivorship, comparability, research methodsAbstract
Administrative datasets are indexed by present-day geography, but the entities recorded in them are compared across time. This note documents what happens when the two disagree. The national expenditure portal for Indonesian regional government returns 508 district-level organisations for the fiscal years 2023 and 2024, and 482 for every year from 2017 to 2022. The 26 missing organisations did not come into existence in 2023; they were reassigned in 2022 to four newly created provinces, and the portal indexes each district under the province to which it belongs now rather than the one it belonged to then. An analyst who takes whatever the source returns therefore compares 482 organisations in 2017 with 508 in 2024 while believing the population constant. The consequence is measurable and one-directional, because the reassigned organisations are unlike those retained: their personnel share of expenditure is 21.65 per cent against 35.19 per cent for the rest, and they carry Rp 44.18 trillion of expenditure between them. Comparing the endpoints on whatever the source returns puts the fall in the national personnel share at 3.27 percentage points; on a consistent panel of the same 482 organisations it is 2.66 points. Nineteen per cent of the apparent change is composition rather than behaviour.References
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