Category: Uncategorized

Though there was a time where critics of development economics could get away with throwing around terms like “neoliberal” and “Washington consensus” around in order to be heard by policy makers, it seems that nowadays, the views of development economists largely prevail in development policy. Part of that is most likely due to the overwhelming focus of development economists on answering narrower but answerable questions. That is, on questions like “Do deworming drugs improve educational outcomes?” rather than on questions like “Do structural adjustment programs foster economic growth?”

The focus on smaller questions has led to impact evaluation activities that are much more credible than they used to be. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s one could get away with comparing outcomes pre- and post-intervention, today any impact evaluation worth its salt has to have a credible research design, i.e., one that allows credibly estimating the causal impacts of a given intervention.

So in the last few years, “impact evaluation” has become quite the buzzword, and everyone — from the greenest of students in Masters programs in development to the development NGOs, and from the big development agencies like USAID to philanthropies like the Gates Foundation — is obsessed with impact evaluation.

That’s a good thing, at least on the face of it: If we know what works, we can better target development interventions, and so development policy can more effectively lift people out of poverty.

Not in my Backyard?

But does everyone really want to be evaluated? I’ve long suspected that, for many actors in development policy, but specifically for NGOs, the answer is “No.” Indeed, many people work with NGOs because they are true believers in the mission of the NGO they work for. Oh, sure: they’ll talk about impact evaluation because the donors want to hear about it. But do they really want to be evaluated? On the one hand, there are true believers. On the other hand, there are those who think “Well, what if an impact evaluation finds no impact? In my heart of hearts I know what we do is right.”

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There has been a lot of talk about unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) lately. An awful lot in the wake of the release of Haushofer and Shapiro’s findings on GiveDirectly in a policy brief (pdf) earlier this month.

In short, Haushofer and Shapiro find that GiveDirectly’s cash transfers (i) allow poor households to build assets, (ii) increase consumption, (iii) reduce hunger, (iv) do not increase spending on alcohol and tobacco, (v) increase investment in and revenue from livestock and small businesses, and (vi) increase the psychological well-being of recipients and their families.

These are all good things, and I look forward to the replication studies that will tell us when and under what conditions UCTs work.

(Matt Collin has a very nice post on UCTs here, in which he adds the caveat that just giving cash will not solve the coordination failures leading to the underprovision of public goods in many developing countries. Likewise, David McKenzie goes into detail about the strengths and weaknesses of Haushofer and Shapiro’s study in a post on the World Bank’s Development Impact blog.)