Bank of Italy uses mobile phone data for Balance of Payments travel item
The Bank of Italy has integrated mobile phone data (MPD) into its estimation process for the 'Travel' item of the Balance of Payments since late 2020. This approach provides more comprehensive information on border crossings and reduces costs compared to traditional survey methodologies.
Integrating Big Data for Travel Statistics
Since the end of 2020, the Bank of Italy has successfully integrated mobile phone data (MPD) into its estimation process for the 'Travel' item of the Balance of Payments.
This innovative approach, described in the paper, complements traditional administrative sources and manual counting operations.
MPD offers significant advantages, including continuous temporal coverage, broader geographical reach, and greater timeliness compared to previous methods.
Furthermore, the use of MPD has led to reduced operational costs for estimating international traveller numbers.
The Bank of Italy emphasizes that effective integration requires ongoing collaboration with mobile network operators to align raw data with official statistical definitions.
Comparative analyses with highly reliable administrative data from border authorities confirm that MPD provides high-quality estimates of international tourist flows, enhancing the comprehensiveness of information on border crossings.
The Promise and Pitfalls of Mobile Phone Data
Mobile phone data (MPD) represent a significant resource for studying social mobility and tourism, offering advantages like lower costs, timeliness, and broad geographic coverage compared to traditional surveys.
However, their adoption in official tourism statistics remains limited globally.
This is primarily due to strict privacy regulations and the inherent complexity of translating international statistical definitions for tourism into telephony terminology.
The paper distinguishes between active and passive MPD, noting that passive data, particularly network-driven data, are more commonly used in research despite potential statistical noise near borders.
While MPD can provide information on the size of tourism flows, they lack qualitative details such as travel characteristics or expenditure, necessitating integration with traditional surveys for comprehensive statistics.
A Pragmatic Step Forward
The Bank of Italy's experience demonstrates a pragmatic and effective integration of big data into official statistics.
While MPD offers clear benefits in coverage and cost, the ongoing need for collaboration and traditional data integration highlights its supplementary, rather than fully substitutive, role.
This approach sets a valuable precedent for other central banks navigating the complexities of modern data sources.