A Tailor-made Data Quality Approach for Higher Educational Data

Purpose: This paper relates the definition of data quality procedures for knowledge organizations such as Higher Education Institutions. The main purpose is to present the flexible approach developed for monitoring the data quality of the European Tertiary Education Register(ETER) database, illustrating its functioning and highlighting the main challenges that still have to be faced in this domain.Design/methodology/approach: The proposed data quality methodology is based on two kinds of checks, one to assess the consistency of cross-sectional data and the other to evaluate the stability of multiannual data. This methodology has an operational and empirical orientation. This means that the proposed checks do not assume any theoretical distribution for the determination of the threshold parameters that identify potential outliers, inconsistencies, and errors in the data. Findings: We show that the proposed cross-sectional checks and multiannual checks are helpful to identify outliers, extreme observations and to detect ontological inconsistencies not described in the available meta-data. For this reason, they may be a useful complement to integrate the processing of the available information.Research limitations: The coverage of the study is limited to European Higher Education Institutions. The cross-sectional and multiannual checks are not yet completely integrated.Practical implications: The consideration of the quality of the available data and information is important to enhance data quality-aware empirical investigations, highlighting problems, and areas where to invest for improving the coverage and interoperability of data in future data collection initiatives.Originality/value: The data-driven quality checks proposed in this paper may be useful as a reference for building and monitoring the data quality of new databases or of existing databases available for other countries or systems characterized by high heterogeneity and complexity of the units of analysis without relying on pre-specified theoretical distributions.

European versus American Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative

China has started to deploy its Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)in the European Union(EU),and the EU in turn has regional and global interests that intersect with the BRI's scope.Subject to future adjustments of China s BRI strategy,the initiative s potential contribution to the EU requirements for infrastructure development could be significant,even though its modalities in the EU are inevitably different from those in countries that are poorer or have more difficult financial market access.The EU's attitude to the BRI,however,has not yet fully coalesced.Despite superficial similarities in public discourses,the EU has a profoundly distinct perspective from that of the US on the BRI,and more generally on the rise of China and its growing global influence.For the EU,the BRI generates challenges but also potential benefits.The EU should improve its ability to welcome sensible BRI projects,including through the adoption of greater reform of screening frameworks for foreign direct investment.More generally,the EU should enhance its ability to define policies independent of the US on China and the challenges resulting from China’s rise.China should also make further efforts to foster a constructive relationship with the EU.