Municipal purchases of face masks in Chile during the first wave of pandemic 2020

We base our research on primary data that was collected from the national registry of public procurement, managed by the Chilean National Directorate of Public Procurement (Dirección Nacional de Compras y Contratación Pública, 2020). The data includes each purchase generated by any entity from the public sector. We focused on the acquisition of face masks by the 320 counties in charge of primary health. Among the recorded values, we were able to define, for each purchase, the type of masks, quantity acquired, price paid, the date of the purchase, and the municipality that bought the equipment. We then generated monthly aggregates by county, in order to have a panel of comparable indicators. The data extraction occurred in January 2021, which allowed us to have data for the period January to December of 2020. Due to the stress among municipal public servants and quick need to purchase PPE, the raw data included aggregated amounts that did not distinguish boxes or units or types of masks. Thus, an additional cleaning data process involved looking at each purchase order and invoices, so to obtain unitary prices, total amounts and types of masks purchased. We also included a series of characteristics from each county, such as municipal autonomous revenue per capita, density and distance from regional capitals, that were available on the public database published online by the Ministry of the Interior (Ministerio del Interior, 2020)

本研究基于由智利国家公共采购和合同公共管理部门（Dirección Nacional de Compras y Contratación Pública, 2020）管理的全国公共采购登记处收集的一手数据。数据涵盖了公共部门任何实体产生的每一笔采购。我们专注于收集负责初级卫生保健的320个县采购口罩的情况。在记录的数值中，我们能够为每一笔采购定义口罩的类型、采购数量、支付价格、采购日期以及购买设备的市镇。随后，我们按县生成月度汇总数据，以便构建一组可比较的指标面板。数据提取发生在2021年1月，这使得我们能够获得2020年1月至12月期间的数据。鉴于市政公务员之间的压力以及快速采购个人防护装备的需求，原始数据中包含了未区分箱、单位或口罩类型的汇总金额。因此，数据清洗过程还包括查看每一份采购订单和发票，以获取单价、总金额和购买的口罩类型。此外，我们还纳入了每个县的若干特征，例如人均市政自主收入、人口密度以及与区域首府的距离，这些信息均可在内政部（Ministerio del Interior, 2020）在线发布的公共数据库中找到。