Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies

EDePo is a research centre based at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It was formed by Professor Orazio Attanasio in 2001, and has been expanding ever since in terms of the projects carried out and human resources. It is committed to identifying successes and failures in policy interventions in developing countries, and to promoting best practice in designing, conducting and evaluating interventions. Most of its research is based around interventions in health, nutrition, skill acquisition, education, credit, and insurance and labour.

EDePo collaborates with international organisations, governments, NGOs and other partners to design and evaluate pro-poor interventions in developing countries and to disseminate research findings. Its 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.

Funding for core research comes from a DfID/ESRC grant. The centre is also partly funded by the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS.