EDePo is a research centre based at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It is committed to identifying successes and failures in policy interventions in developing countries. It aims to promote best practice in the design, conduct and evaluation of development interventions.

Most of EDePo's research is based around interventions in health, nutrition, skill acquisition, education, credit, and insurance and labour.

Structural approaches

EDePo's main objective is to generate knowledge about cost-effective, feasible and sustainable interventions that can be implemented in environments different from those for which they were originally designed. This requires understanding the mechanisms through which a particular programme works and so involves modelling the reaction of individual agents (individuals, households, or firms) to the economic (and other) incentives provided by the programme.

This is done through the analysis of detailed micro-level data. An important part of the current and future activities of EdePo is the design of surveys for micro-level data collection. See our 'Resources' page for some of the tools we have developed in the course of this work.