Country and Regional Analyses (CRA) - UK Government Finances

Data files

This dataset contains 4 files

Readme

The HM Treasury Country and Regional Analysis (CRA) dataset shows where in the country benefit has been had from the spending of each government department.

The CRA is a data set produced annually by the HM Treasury and is part of their Public Expenditure and Statistical Analysis (PESA). The data is produced by each government department and collected by the Treasury in February. Each government department has to determine which parts of the country have benefited from spending in its different programs (Program Object Groups -- POGs). Each department defines their own POGs and the Treasury require that the departments fit their POGS under COFOG functions.

Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses (PESA) is published by HM Treasury, annually soon after the Budget. It is public spending by combinations of:

• Government function (defined by the UN Classification Of the Functions Of Government (COFOG) for 2007 onwards)
• Government department
• Area of the country (defined by the NUTS12 classification system)
• Time (estimates of future spending and reviews of past spending)
• Forms of aggregation (this includes dividing spending between DEL and AME, resource (near-cash and non-cash) and capital, and administration and programme budgets).

# Data

See data directory. Details are in datapackage.json.

Preparation

See scripts/README.md for instructions on running the scripts to obtain and prepare the data.

Unmatched rows

CRA Table 9 has regional breakdown, while table 10 has COFOG2 codes. The scripts combines them and deals with inconsistencies. If there are any rows that can't be matched, they'll be dumped into files called unmatched_table9.csv and unmatched_table10.csv. Very often these will be small typos that you can then go and fix in the source files by hand before rerunning the scripts.

Data warnings

This section is largely transcribed from e-mail: http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/wdmmg-discuss/2010-April/000165.html

The "function" and "subfunction" columns of the published CRA data contain broken data, and that we have been using a mapping designed by William Waites to fix them. Dave Boyce has also produced such a mapping, and we thought it would be a good idea to cross-check them.

It was! I have been able to fix several errors and omissions. However, there are still some hard ones that I would like some help with. There is some partially helpful advice from HM Treasury here:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-RA-07-022/EN/KS-RA-07-022-EN.PDF

Here are the noteworthy ones:

• Anything with a subfunction of "LA data subfunction" is a problem. I don't know what this means. This occurs at least once for every function. I have mapped these to relatively coarse COFOG codes: 1, 2, 3, 4.1, 4.2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

• Function "EU entries", subfunction "EC receipts" is left "unclassified" by HMT. I've mapped this to 1.8 (Transfers of a general character between different levels of government).

• Function "EU entries", subfunction "GNI-based contribution (net of abatement and collection costs)" is also left unmapped. I have mapped it to 1.2 (Foreign economic aid).

• [APS updating for 2010] Rows with function "EU entries", subfunction also "EU entries": I've attributed to 1.8 for now, but will ask others to review.

• Many of the sub-sub-functions of COFOG function 1 (General public services) all say "of which: public and common services". This is presumably a cut-and-paste error.

• Function "3. Public order and safety", subfunction "of which: immigration and citizenship" is a tricky one. HMT recommends mapping it to 3.1.2.

• Function "of which: agriculture, fisheries and forestry", sub-function "of which: other agriculture, food and fisheries policy" maps to two COFOG codes: 4.2.1 and 4.2.3. I have mapped it all to 4.2.3, on the feeble grounds that nothing else is mapped there.

• We previous little level-3 data for code 4 (economic affairs) except for 4.5 (transport). Even there, nothing maps onto 4.5.2 (water transport) or 4.5.4 (air transport).

• Function "of which: transport", subfunction "of which: local public transport" is mapped to 4.5.1 (road transport).

• Many of the sub-sub-functions of COFOG function 4 (economic affairs) all say "of which: enterprise and economic development". This is presumably a cut-and-paste error.

• Function "7. Health" and subfunction "Central and other health services" maps to both 7.4 and 7.6. I have mapped it all to 7.4.

• Function "7. Health", subfunction "Medical services" maps to 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3. I have mapped it all to 7.1.

• Code 10 means "Social protection", and inside it are codes 10.7 "Social exclusion" and 10.9 "Social protection". Therefore, where the published data says function is "Social protection" and subfunction is "blah, blah (social exclusion)" I assume I should use 10.7. However, when both function and subfunction say "Social protection" is it valid to use 10.9?