论文标题
威权政府似乎操纵了共同数据
Authoritarian Governments Appear to Manipulate COVID Data
论文作者
论文摘要
由于SARS-COV-2（COVID-19）统计数据会影响经济政策和政治成果，因此政府有动力控制它们。在民主国家中，操纵的可能性可能较小，这些民主国家的检查可以确保透明度。我们表明，有关疾病负担的数据，专制政府相对于民主政府的数据修改指标。首先，关于19日的COVID案件和威权政府死亡的数据显示，与7天移动平均线相比，差异明显较小。由于政府没有理由向数据添加噪声，因此较低的偏差是证据表明数据可能被按摩。其次，关于COVID-19的数据，威权政府死亡的数据并不遵循本福德的法律，该法律描述了数字的主要数字分布。与该法律的偏差用于测试会计欺诈。对COVID-19数据的平滑和调整可能表明对这些数据的其他改变，并且需要在跟踪疾病时考虑这种改变。
Because SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) statistics affect economic policies and political outcomes, governments have an incentive to control them. Manipulation may be less likely in democracies, which have checks to ensure transparency. We show that data on disease burden bear indicia of data modification by authoritarian governments relative to democratic governments. First, data on COVID-19 cases and deaths from authoritarian governments show significantly less variation from a 7 day moving average. Because governments have no reason to add noise to data, lower deviation is evidence that data may be massaged. Second, data on COVID-19 deaths from authoritarian governments do not follow Benford's law, which describes the distribution of leading digits of numbers. Deviations from this law are used to test for accounting fraud. Smoothing and adjustments to COVID-19 data may indicate other alterations to these data and a need to account for such alterations when tracking the disease.
