Economic and sustainable development
Most of this research area covers the programme of research called Policy Priority Inference (PPI), developed with Gonzalo Castañeda. This work focuses on the importance of government expenditure as a driving force of development. While growing this work stream, we have studied various critical problems of development, such as aid effectiveness, the role of public governance, the quantification of policy coherence, policy resilience, financing subnational development, and achieving equitable health outcomes. Much of this work has been accompanied by policy projects in collaboration with organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank. In addition, the PPI toolkit has been used by national and subnational governments around the world. If you wish to learn more about the policy side of this research area and the analytic tools it has produced, please visit the official PPI website at https://policypriority.org.
How do governments determine policy priorities?
Published on: 2018Effective policy prioritisation is key to successful development strategies. Yet, from our experience consulting for governments and international organisations, it seemed that governments rarely enact the priorities they promote in public speech. At the time we wrote this piece, there was little data mapping budgets (the actions/priorities) into development goals (the aspirations). Hence, this was our first attempt to model the policy prioritisation process of a government with the aim of explaining the performance of its indicators. This work was the seminal piece that led to the growth of the Policy Priority Inference programme of research.
The resilience of public policies in economic development
Published on: 2018Once we had developed a model of policy prioritisation, we were equiped to study a variety of topics through counterfactual analysis. Our first study looked at the problem of whether a set of goals remains feasible after an exogenous shock reduces the expenditure capability of the government. This work became very relevant as we entered the Covid-19 pandemic and governments around the world had to cut down expenses. It allowed us to develop the first formal metric of policy resilience.
How do social capabilities shape a country's comparative advantages?
Published on: 2024This work expands the notion of the product space to account for social capabilities as part of the development of nations.
The importance of social and government learning in ex ante policy evaluation
Published on: 2019A common question that we got whenever we would present our policy-prioritisation model was if it accounted for the Lucas critique: the idea that policy based on models that ignore expectations would ultimately fail. Hence, in a more academic-oriented piece, we elaborate on how agent-computing models can address the Lucas critique in a wider and more flexible way than other popular frameworks in economics.
Quantifying the coherence of development policy priorities
Published on: 2020A concept that seemed prevalent in the broader development community, and especially in policy circles, is "policy coherence". To our surprise, most of the work on this topic was theoretical or conceptual. It seemed necessary to formalise this idea and quantify it to provide policymakers with tools to systematically evaluate whether (and how much) the actions (priorities) or governments are coherent with their goals (aspirations). This is the first quantitative study on policy coherence for development.
Policy priority inference
Published on: 2020Shortly after our first publications on policy prioritisation, we were approached by the UNDP as they saw potential in our model to address challenges related to the Sustainable Development Goals. This was our first attempt to generalise our model (to account for conflicting priorities) and make it usable with most existing datasets.
Estimating networks of sustainable development goals
Published on: 2022As we dived in the field of sustainable development, we became aware of the central concepts of synergies and trade-offs, often represented as networks between indicators. To our surprise, the field seemed quite precarious in the use of adequate quantitative methods to estimate such networks. The purpose of this paper was to introduce the sustainable development community to a plethora of network estimation methods (from different disciplines) that are usable with existing indicator datasets.
Does expenditure in public governance guarantee less corruption?
Published on: 2021During the early 21st century, public governance became a mainstream topic in development economics, especially in the study of corruption. Most evidence advocating to spend more on improving the rule of law comes from cross-country studies. Ironically, country-specific evidence on the effectiveness of such expenditure is poor. This paper addresses this paradox using our policy prioritisation model, and demonstrates the large challenges that least-developed nations face in finding the right policy mix.
Subnational sustainable development
Published on: 2022In our policy-prioritisation work with policymakers, we were frequently asked if our method could be applied to subnational entities, as a substantial part of development policies are implemented there. This paper demonstrates how to deploy our methodology for subnational analysis. In particular, we provide valuable insights on how to best distribute federal transfers across the 32 states of Mexico.
How does government expenditure impact sustainable development?
Published on: 2022Another concept that is important in development economics and, yet, lacks a quantitative treatment is that of a structural bottleneck. Here we propose a method to identify policy issues that have potential structural bottlenecks and present a worldwide diagnostic of the obstacles that they represent in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Perceived Adequacy of Policy Instruments Reveals Weak Targets in the Sustainable Development Goals
Published on: 2024During our policy-oriented projects, we realised that most impact evaluation studies assumed that relevant policy instruments exist. From our experience of talking to hundreds of policymakers and analysing highly disaggregate data on government programmes, it was clear that this is an often untested assumption. In fact, a global picture of the existence or adequacy of policy instruments across policy issues dis no exist. Hence, we ran a worldwide expert survey and gathered more than 130,000 responses on the existence and adequacy of policy instruments in the Sustainable Development Goals, creating the first large-scale dataset in this topic.
Budgeting for SDGs
Published on: 2023After working on various applications of our policy-priority framework, we took a step back to reflect on where it stood against alternative impact-evaluation approaches in the context of multi-dimensional development. This work presents a systematic analysis comparing our framework to other two popular approaches: regression analysis and machine learning.
Budgetary allocation and health for all
Published on: 2024This is our first attempt to bring the policy priority inference framework to a domain-specific application. Here, we study the problem of reaching a well-being economy in England using a unique dataset with manually mapped data on budget lines and outcome indicators.
Aid effectiveness in sustainable development
Published on: 2023With the knowledge gathered from our previous work in policy prioritisation, we were equipped to tackle one of the most important issues in development economics: the impact of international aid. For more than 60 years, this was a controversial topic because evidence on the effectiveness of aid at the macro level had been mixed. Hence, this paper conciliates many discussions around this topic and provides the first worldwide estimates on aid impact that are specific to each country and indicator.
Complexity economics and sustainable development
Published on: 2024After five years working on Policy Priority Inference, we decided to write a book that would showcase the latest version of our model, applications, open source code, and data. This book is the synthesis of this programme of research and the most complete introduction to its toolkit. It also introduces new concepts and measures such as accelerators and systemic bottlenecks.