2020.05.13 edition
Employee protections. The UN International Labour Organization’s Employment Protection Legislation Database tracks “legal information on the regulation of temporary contracts and employment termination at the initiative of the employer,” on a national-regulatory level. The database quantifies and categorizes regulations under nine “themes” — including grounds for dismissal, procedures for collective dismissals, severance pay, and redress — and for more than 100 countries.
COVID stimulus recipients. The nonprofit Good Jobs First has launched COVID Stimulus Watch, which is gathering data on the grants and loans that have been provided to corporations through the $2 trillion CARES Act. So far, the dataset contains more than 5,700 awards, totalling $54 billion. The records are based on information from public financial filings, press releases, and, most recently, data from the government’s healthcare-focused Provider Relief Fund.
National wildernesses. Since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the US federal government has established 803 official wilderness areas, which cover more than 111 million acres. They’re all part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, co-managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Forest Service. The University of Montana’s Wilderness.net brings data about each of the agencies’ wildernesses into one place, where it can be explored via an interactive map and downloaded in bulk. For each wilderness, the dataset provides its name, description, boundaries, acreage, year designated, and more.
EU legislative edits. Computer science graduate student Victor Kristof has built a dataset of 450,000 legislative edits proposed by members of the EU parliament from 2009 to 2019. For each proposed edit, the dataset points to the relevant legislation, names the parlimentarian, and indicates whether the edit was accepted. In an accompanying academic paper, Kristof et al. describe the dataset’s construction and “propose a model for predicting the success of such edits.”
Millions of Iowa liquor purchases. Iowa’s Alcoholic Beverages Division publishes itemized data on all liquor sales by grocery/liquor/convenience-type stores since January 2002 — more than 18 million purchases in all. For each purchase, the dataset includes the specific kind, amount, and cost of the liquor, plus the date and location of the sale. Previously: State liquor prices (DIP 2019.08.07). [h/t Martin Burch]