Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies

Poverty eradication and development will not be brought about by macroeconomic policies alone. While such policies are essential, ensuring that the poor can participate in the economy is an essential ingredient of pro-poor growth policies. In turn, this requires interventions that identify and address specific market failures. Such interventions include those to remove obstacles to the accumulation of human capital build up in the form of health and skills of the poor; to provide them access to investment opportunities, via access to capital; and to ensure that markets work in favour of the poor.

Much development support has long been in the form of such specific interventions, including nutrition support programs and food-for-work programs, education support programs via school meals, micro-credit initiatives, skill acquisition programs and social funds. Much has been learned about the difficulties of designing such interventions from broad practical experience and from specific case studies. However, even when some interventions have been deemed successful, it is difficult to export these experiences to different context and situations. One reason for this difficulty is the lack of systematic and large-scale evaluations of the impact of these interventions on the poor.

The Centre, partly funded by the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analsysis of Public Policy at IFS, is committed to identifying success and failures in interventions and to promoting best practice in evaluating and conducting interventions. In particular, the Centre will be a focal point for research on the impact of specific interventions in health, nutrition, skill acquisition, education, credit, insurance and labour. It will conduct evaluations of specific interventions in developing countries, provide support to institutions conducting evaluations, engage in advocacy on best practice in terms of evaluations and on the design of interventions itself.

The main purpose of an evaluation, in addition to the direct assessment of the effect of a program, has to be the improvement of existing programs and evaluating the possibility of extending them to environments different from those for which they were first designed. For this to be possible, it is crucial to understand why a given program works or does not work. Such an understanding can only be achieved by modelling individual behaviour and the reaction of individuals to the economic incentives provided by the program.

An important implication of this focus is that detailed micro-level data will be required to conduct such evaluations. We need data measuring the response of individual agents (individuals, households, or firms) to the proposed program and, more generally, to economic incentives. Some of these micro data are collected for the explicit purpose of evaluating a particular program. An important part of the activities of the Centre will be the design of such surveys. There are important lessons that can be learned in this area.