The Power of Evidence: Improving the Effectiveness of Government by Investing in More Rigorous Evaluation

Rachel Glennerster

National Institute Economic Review, 2012, vol. 219, issue 1, R4-R14

Abstract: The current fiscal climate is focusing attention on the need for more efficient government. However, we have remarkably little rigorous information on which are the most cost-effective strategies for achieving common goals like delivering high quality education in deprived neighbourhoods or reducing carbon emissions. This paper argues that randomised impact evaluations can provide an effective way to generate the information needed to make government more effective. Advances in the theory and practice of running randomised evaluations mean that a wider range of questions can be answered than ever before. Elsewhere in the world, fundamental questions are being answered about how humans behave, which in turn are being used to design new policies which themselves are rigorously tested. By learning from these results, and by conducting more randomised evaluations on issues important to UK policy (both at home and abroad) it will be possible to design more effective policies and do more with less.

Keywords: Randomised evaluations, experiments; development; programme evaluation; behavioural economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ner.sagepub.com/content/219/1/R4.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:niesru:v:219:y:2012:i:1:p:r4-r14

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in National Institute Economic Review from National Institute of Economic and Social Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().