Transparency about Returns

This report gives the results of a baseline survey of the Open Government initiative in the Netherlands. The aim of Open Government is to make government bodies more transparent, more facilitating and more accessible. The report examines how the social effects of the Open Government actions can be measured. The effects and ways of measuring them are examined by applying a welfare analytic framework.

An important result of this survey is that more light has been shed on the substance and effects of the Open Government actions. It also gives lessons about the preconditions for measuring the effects of policy changes and the types of policy that are more or less susceptible to measurement. It was not possible to carry out a full baseline survey for most of the actions. The main reasons are that some actions are at a too early stage to be measured, some of them are difficult to measure anyway because of their supporting nature, and in many cases not all the data required is recorded.