Skip to content

Category: Policy

Published November 11, 2011

Blogging and the Research-Policy Nexus (Updated)

When I finished my masters in December of 2000, I was fortunate to spend the few months I had to spare until the start of my Ph.D. interning at the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Other than a good excuse to spend the spring and part of the summer in Rome and to learn Italian, that internship did two things. First, it allowed me to learn a lot about how policy was made within the United Nations system. It then made me realize just how much I wanted to do a Ph.D.

The two are not unrelated. What cemented the two in my mind was the realization, early on in my internship, that policy making was far behind the research frontier. Having just finished my Masters, I only had a vague idea of where the research frontier lied, but even that vague idea seemed better than the research results on which United Nations (UN) development policy seemed to be based.

Not only was this understandable, it also appeared inevitable. Few people if any in the UN system had the time or the inclination to read up on the latest scientific discoveries. When they did hear about those discoveries, it was usually in the context of seminars, workshops, or conferences. Unfortunately, such events take time and money to organize, and so there was a considerable lag between research and policy.

Blogs as Catalysts

All that has changed with the advent and subsequent spread of blogs, which allow for the rapid dissemination of just about any kind of information. In the space of ten years, I have seen policy makers being only able to refer to research findings they had learned about in grad school to the same policy makers dropping the most recent research findings in casual conversation.

Although there are many blogs out there that still read like someone’s diary, there are a great many blogs whose goals include the dissemination of research results — this being one such blog in the realm of international development.

On the supply side, a blogger who wants to be read must present his or her would-be audience with news they can use, whether said news is about the latest celebrity gossip or cutting-edge research. A blogger’s incentives are thus stacked in favor of clear and concise writing. On the demand side, blogs allow those who wish to be more effective in their work to acquire and “consume” bite-sized chunks of information.

Blogs will never replace peer-reviewed journals, but they are now part and parcel of the policy research process, if only because they have substantially reduced the speed at which policy makers can assimilate research results and put them into practice.

UPDATE: The London School of Economic’s Impact of Social Sciences blog just published this interview with Austin Frakt, who blogs at The Incidental Economist with my colleague Don Taylor. Here’s the most relevant excerpt:

Consistent with all this, I read a lot of empirically-oriented academic papers and other material produced by subject-matter experts and relevant to health policy. It has a lot more to say about the likely outcomes of various policy interventions than most people realize.

But it’s not readily accessible to those it can best serve, policymakers. One way to reach policymakers is by translating the content of technical work for journalists. If journalists can understand and report on it, there is a prayer it might influence policy. As a community, health services researchers still have a long way to go in this regard. Only 0.04% (not a typo!) of published papers in health are reported on by the media. Blogs and other social media can help.

Published November 9, 2011

The Causes and Consequences of Famine (Slides)

Last Wednesday, I took part in a panel discussion at Wake Forest University titled “The ‘F’-Word: Famine in the 21st Century,” on the current famine in the Horn of Africa.

The other two participants were Charles Kennedy and Sarah Lischer, both professors in the political science department at Wake Forest. Sarah talked about the humanitarian consequences of the current famine, most notably the refugees coming into Kenya. Charles talked about US foreign policy in the area. I learned a lot from both their presentations, given that they covered topics that I was not familiar with.

Here are the slides I used for my talk, which was titled “The Causes and Consequences of Famine.” The link opens a .pdf document. Note that this was not a research seminar, but a talk aimed at a general public.

Published November 4, 2011

Food Deserts: Health Impacts and a Short Reading List

From an article in this week’s issue of The Economist:

This part of Chicago’s South Side is in the heart of one of America’s many food deserts. These are notable not for the absence of food, but for the kind of food available. Though crisps, sweets and doughnuts are easy to come by, an apple is a rare commodity. Yet all the evidence shows that poor access to quality food results in a higher risk of obesity, diabetes and cancer — and more avoidable deaths.

Although cynics might argue that the market gives people the food they deserve, research published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests otherwise. During the 1990s, when the American government paid for around 1,800 women to move out of public housing, the women who had moved showed a 20% lower rate of obesity and diabetes than those who had not. In other words, their improved environment (which many assume would include better shops) led to their better health.

Here is a link to the New England Journal of Medicine article by Ludwig et al., which relies on a randomized controlled trial. Here is the Wikipedia page discussing food deserts.

This article by Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill lists many scholarly references on food deserts. In particular, I would check out those by Alcaly and Klevorick (1971), Caraher et al. (1998), Goodman (1968), Whelan et al. (2002), and Wrigley et al. (2002).