Angie Palacios
Moderator
The rapid development of digitization, new digital technologies and the data-driven economy have contributed to the exponential growth in data creation and consumption around the world (CAF, 2021). The European Union has estimated that approximately 90% of the data currently available has been generated in the last 2 years (Mohamed & Weber, 2020). However, although cities are making efforts to collect data, these are not necessarily being organized, centralized and focused on solving specific problems. The International Data Corporation (IDC) firm estimates that by the end of 2025, 80% of the world's data may be unstructured data.
Moreover, in some Latin American and Caribbean countries there is no consensus on the importance of taking advantage of data for the formulation of public policies and public sector entities claim to be significantly behind their peers regarding data and technology: 43% of these perceive themselves as lagging behind the Latin American and Caribbean average. This figure rises to 67% when compared to leading countries globally. Close to 40% do not have a digital transformation strategy, while this figure is 27% for the private sector (IDB, 2022).
Harnessing the power of more accurate data from concept to implementation through data collection, planning and monitoring supports transformative change in the transport sector by enabling data driven decision making. A recent investigation recognizes data as an asset for the generation of social and economic value, indicating that there could be a reduction of 15% in the cost of infrastructure services thanks to better use of data and digital technologies, and that this could increase the GDP of Latin America and the Caribbean by 6% in 10 years (IDB, 2020a).