IMPROVING DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE: Building Knowledge Through Evaluations and Research by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conflict and Security Issues : Policy, Reviews and Evaluations. Education : Education Research and Theory
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 2008-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

EXAMPLES OF THE USE OF RANDOMIZED EVALUATIONS IN IMPACT EVALUATIONS OF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE (INCLUDING DG PROJECTS)

Randomized designs have a high degree of internal validity. By permitting a comparison of outcomes in a treatment group and a control group that can be considered identical to one another, they do a better job than any other evaluation technique of permitting evaluators to identify the impact of a given intervention. It is no surprise, therefore, that randomized evaluation is the industry standard for the assessment of new medications. It is inconceivable that a pharmaceutical company would be permitted to introduce a new medication into the market unless evidence from a randomized evaluation proved its benefits. Yet as discussed in Chapter 2, for the assessment of DG assistance programs, impact evaluations have rarely been employed. This leaves USAID in the difficult position of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on assistance programs without proven effects.

There are a small, but important, number of large N randomized impact evaluations that have been carried out to test the effects of assistance programs. Classic evaluations, such as the RAND health insurance study and the evaluation of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), stand out as exemplars of large-scale assessments of social assistance programs (Wilson 1998, Gueron and Hamilton 2002, Newhouse 2004). A few have been done in developing countries; the evaluation of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Progresa/Oportunidades, continues to shape the design of similar programs in other contexts (Morley and Coady 2003).

The number of such evaluations is growing. In fields as diverse as public health, education, microfinance, and agricultural development, randomized evaluations are increasingly employed to assess project effectiveness. Examples abound in the field of public health: Studies have assessed the efficacy of male circumcision in combating HIV (Auvert et al 2005), the impact of HIV prevention programs on sexual behavior (Dupas 2007), the effectiveness of bed nets for reducing the incidence of malaria (Nevill et al 1996), the impact of deworming drugs on health and educational achievement (Miguel and Kremer 2004), and the role of investments in clean water technologies on health outcomes (Kremer et al 2006). In education, randomized evaluations have been used to explore the efficacy of conditional cash transfers (Schultz 2004), school meals (Vermeersch and Kremer 2004), and school uniforms and textbooks (Kremer 2003) on school enrollment; the effectiveness of additional inputs, such as teacher aids, on school performance (Banerjee and Kremer 2002); and the impact of school reforms, such as voucher programs, on academic achievement (Angrist et al 2006). In microfinance, attention has focused on the impact of programs on household welfare (Murdoch 2005); randomized evaluations in agricultural development are exploring the benefits and impediments to the adoption of new technologies, such as hybrid seeds and fertilizer (Duflo et al 2006a).

Thus far, however, these approaches have not been applied to the evaluation of DG programs. A significant part of the explanation for this is that it is often more difficult to measure outcomes in the area of democratic governance. Most successful randomized

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