Quantifying the Coherence of Development Policy Priorities

Omar Guerrero and Gonzalo Casta\~neda

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Over the last 30 years, the concept of policy coherence for development has received especial attention among academics, practitioners and international organizations. However, its quantification and measurement remain elusive. To address this challenge, we develop a theoretical and empirical framework to measure the coherence of policy priorities for development. Our procedure takes into account the country-specific constraints that governments face when trying to reach specific development goals. Hence, we put forward a new definition of policy coherence where context-specific efficient resource allocations are employed as the baseline to construct an index. To demonstrate the usefulness and validity of our index, we analyze the cases of Mexico, Korea and Estonia, three developing countries that, arguably, joined the OECD with the aim of coherently establishing policies that could enable a catch-up process. We find that Korea shows significant signs of policy coherence, Estonia seems to be in the process of achieving it, and Mexico has unequivocally failed. Furthermore, our results highlight the limitations of assessing coherence in terms of naive benchmark comparisons using development-indicator data. Altogether, our framework sheds new light in a promising direction to develop bespoke analytic tools to meet the 2030 agenda.

Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.00430 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:1902.00430

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().