It’s Easter, or as the Uruguayans call it, “tourism week”. So let us talk about religion and development. The immense majority of the world’s population is religious and believes that religion is important. According to the World Values Survey, 70% of the world’s population considers them-selves a “religious person”. In almost all of the developing countries that participate … [Read more...] about Is religion good for health and education?
Randomized Control Trials on a Budget
A few weeks ago, Martin Ravallion wrote a great blog on “shoe-string” evaluations, in which he suggested that there are ways of bypassing two of the most costly items in rigorous Impact Evaluations: contemporaneous credible baseline data; and second, “objectively assessed outcome indicators”, which are based on surveys. Ravallion then proposed a “shoestring” solution that … [Read more...] about Randomized Control Trials on a Budget
Spreading the news: Impact evaluation on video
Most of the material available on impact evaluation resides in technical papers with very limited readership. Some “interesting” results get exposure in widely read sites such as Freakonomics and then are amplified by public radio stations across the US. In the past year some great books have come out that aim to provide more accessible accounts of impact evaluation such as … [Read more...] about Spreading the news: Impact evaluation on video
On theories of change and missing data: why I want a cat
I haven’t had much time to write a blog entry this week and the one I was writing became too complicated (on cognitive bias and discrimination - started very intuitively but I became mired in very slow thinking). … [Read more...] about On theories of change and missing data: why I want a cat
Impact evaluation, cost effectiveness and cost benefit analysis: back to the future?
In the last decade, attention has increasingly been placed on measuring and establishing the causality of the impact that development projects or interventions – either privately or publicly funded - have on an outcome of interest. In many areas such as health, education and social protection there is an emerging consensus on how to estimate the causal impact of … [Read more...] about Impact evaluation, cost effectiveness and cost benefit analysis: back to the future?