HKS Center for International Development Publications

Nearly all challenges in international development tend to be complex because they depend on constantly evolving human behaviour, systems, and contexts, involving multiple actors, entities, and processes. As a result, both the discovery and scaling of innovations to address challenges in development often involve changes in system behaviour or even system-level transformation. This is rarely a linear process over time and can result in unexpected outcomes. Existing evaluation techniques commonly used in international development, including Randomized Control Trials (RCT) and quasi-experimental methods, are good at assessing specific effects of interventions but are not designed for the change processes inherent to innovation and scaling within a system. There is a need to reconstruct how we use existing measurement tools, techniques, and methodologies so that they capture the complexity of the environment in which an intervention or change occurs. We introduce Adaptive Evaluation, designed to learn at various levels of complexity while supporting the transformation needed to foster sustainable change. An Adaptive Evaluation uses three main approaches to work with complex questions—systems diagnosis, theory-based assessment of change processes, and iterative designs. An Adaptive Evaluation typically builds hypotheses from field-based interactions, emphasizes learning over testing, advocates open-mindedness with techniques, and appreciates the value of dialogue and participation in navigating complex processes. It can use RCT or similar techniques to analyse specific processes within a system or a development cycle, but these are embedded in a broader approach to assessment and interpretation. It is designed to be flexible and adjust to shifting contexts. Finally, an Adaptive Evaluation can be applied at any stage in a complex intervention's lifecycle, from the interpretation of the system and change processes to rapid experimentation, prototyping, and testing of select interventions, and then adaptation to different settings for impact at scale. This paper provides the theoretical basis for an Adaptive Evaluation—the main approaches, core ideology, process, and applications.

The G8 is considering committing to purchase vaccines against diseases concentrated in low-income countries (if and when desirable vaccines are developed) as a way to spur research and development on vaccines for these diseases. Under such an “advance market commitment,” one or more sponsors would commit to a minimum price to be paid per person immunized for an eligible product, up to a certain number of individuals immunized. For additional purchases, the price would eventually drop to close to marginal cost. If no suitable product were developed, no payments would be made. We estimate the offer size which would make revenues similar to the revenues realized from investments in typical existing commercial pharmaceutical products, as well as the degree to which various model contracts and assumptions would affect the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment. We make adjustments for lower marketing costs under an advance market commitment and the risk that a developer may have to share the market with subsequent developers. We also show how this second risk could be reduced, and money saved, by introducing a superiority clause to a commitment. Under conservative assumptions, we document that a commitment comparable in value to sales earned by the average of a sample of recently launched commercial products (adjusted for lower marketing costs) would be a highly cost-effective way to address HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Sensitivity analyses suggest most characteristics of a hypothetical vaccine would have little effect on the cost-effectiveness, but that the duration of protection conferred by a vaccine strongly affects potential cost-effectiveness. Readers can conduct their own sensitivity analyses employing a web-based spreadsheet tool.

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R&D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates depend on initial cost structure. We find that in many (but not all) African countries, low tax/high investment regimes would be time-inconsistent. For pro-growth policies to become sustainable, commitment mechanisms or new production techniques would be needed.

Current agriculture in Sub-Sahara Africa is undeveloped and the Green Revolution has left the continent largely untouched. Poor performance is often related to a number of socio-economic factors. In this paper we argue that there are also some specifities of natural resources, namely local homogeneity and spatial diversity of the pre-dominant Basement Complex soils, that imply that simple fertilizer strategies may not produce the yield increases obtained elsewhere.

The Consumer Price Index is a Laspeyres index which uses a plutocratic aggregate method. The Mexican CPI is not an exception. This paper has three purposes. The first purpose is to assemble a democratic CPI. The second purpose is to construct an alternative one using the median of the expenditure distribution. The third purpose is to compile price indexes for each one of the ten expenditure deciles. The concern about the use of a single price measurement has tremendous policy implications. In the last part the empirical results are analyzed in terms of the political economy of price measurement and in terms of the history of the monetary policy.

The "Resource Curse" posits a positive association between the value of natural commodities and civil conflict. In this paper, we suggest that the value-to-violence relationship differs across commodities, and that the factor intensity of production determines whether a rise in the price of a legally traded good will exacerbate conflict. We exploit exogenous price shocks for coffee and oil to test this hypothesis, using data on politically-motivated violence in Colombia over 1988 to 2004. We find that a drop in coffee prices during the 1990s led to a disproportionate rise in conflict in the coffee areas. Poverty dynamics follow a similar pattern, while substitution into drug crops do not, which suggests that it is the fall in income rather than the drug trade that fuelled this effect. In contrast, we find that oil prices are positively related to clashes with government forces, and that state revenue is used to strengthen military presence in oil areas. Our results suggest that the income channel is critical in determining how price shocks to labor-intensive commodities affect insurgency. However, for capital-intensive goods, the revenue effect predominates in mediating how the value of the commodity affects violence.

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker’s country of origin (the recipient of the remittance), while procyclical with respect to income in the migrant’s host country (the sender of the remittance). The econometric results confirm the hypothesis. This affirmation of smoothing is important for two reasons. First, it suggests that remittances should be placed on the list of criteria for an optimum currency area. Second, it brings in to doubt plans by governments in some developing countries to harness remittances for their own use, in that government spending in these countries generally fails the test of countercyclicality which remittances pass.

“Green accounting” refers to the incorporation of changes in wealth, in particular natural resource wealth, into a country’s national accounts. Despite a large body of theoretical work and considerable promotional efforts by international and national organizations, there is no firm evidence that greener national accounting measures provide better indicators of long-run economic possibilities. In this paper I construct per capita estimates of green net national product (NNP) and genuine savings for 13 countries in Latin America during 1973-86. I then test econometrically whether these measures are systematically related to consumption in subsequent years. I deal with possible nonstationarity in the data series by estimating models expressed in first-differences, in addition to models expressed in levels. Despite incomplete adjustments and crude data, my estimates of genuine savings are related to future consumption in a manner consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, all the coefficients on the individual components of genuine savings have the correct signs and are highly statistically significant in both the models with levels and the models with first-differences. Results are more mixed for green NNP. An irony of my results is that physical capital, not natural capital, appears to be the greater source of data problems for green accounting.

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the last two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit less, leading to concerns that further increases in skilled migration will hamper remittance growth. We revisit the relationship between education and remitting behavior using microdata from surveys of immigrants in eleven major destination countries. The data show a mixed pattern between education and the likelihood of remitting, and a strong positive relationship between education and the amount remitted conditional on remitting. Combining these intensive and extensive margins gives an overall positive effect of education on the amount remitted. The microdata then allow investigation as to why the more educated remit more. We find the higher income earned by migrants, rather than characteristics of their family situations explains much of the higher remittances.

This paper examines bid adjustments across multiple trial rounds to identify learning by participants in a procurement auction for conservation contracts in Indonesia. Outcomes from previous rounds show an effect on adjustment in subsequent rounds, which is significantly different from predictions under simulated random bidding. This pattern indicates systematic incorporation of information into bid formation, consistent with learning. Individual bidding variability decreases with repetition, consistent with the discovery of a common value component to the auctioned conservation contract. Implications for future implementation of conservation auctions in developing countries and directions for future research are discussed.

Using panel data the question whether Africa's growth performance can be accounted for is analyzed in the framework of the augmented Solow model. Our results indicate that this model can account for Africa's low growth performance, provided that we allow for unobserved country specific effects and the endogeneity of investment in estimating the parameters of the model.

A long-standing literature in the sociology of organizations (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983) suggests that, as change agents face uncertainty about actions and outcomes, they often seek legitimacy through isomorphism: adopting structures, policies and reforms similar (at least in appearance) to those deemed successful elsewhere. We examine history’s most rapid reduction of fertility—from 8.4 in 1985 to 2.4 in 2002, in rural Iran—as an example of successful autonomous reform. The Iranian state, which was self-consciously cut off from nearly all of the traditional vectors of global isomorphism, initiated a successful behavioral change in a domain (family planning) perhaps unexpected for an Islamic state. We describe and explain the Iranian approach, in particular the rural program, contrasting it with the global strategy of adopting universal “best practices.”

Recent empirical research on emerging markets debt, currency crises and fiscal sustainability has placed a significant focus on the role of currency mismatches with the emphasis placed on the currency composition of explicit government liabilities. The key insight of this paper is that these liabilities, while relevant, usually represent a small share of actual government liabilities: indeed, as an indicator of fiscal solvency, they are relatively uninformative – and possibly misleading – if not matched with the remaining liabilities (promises of wage and pension payments among others) and the asset side of the government’s balance sheet: financial and real government assets as well as the present value of future tax collection. These non-debt liabilities and assets may be affected by changes in the real exchange rate in a way that dwarfs the effect on the explicit liabilities which are typically the focus of attention. With this in mind, this paper proposes a balance-sheet approach that, as illustrated by the practical applications included here, may radically alter the results from traditional sustainability evaluations – and, more generally, the perception of a country’s fiscal vulnerability.

Professional football clubs are ubiquitous in Europe. Every small to medium sized city has one. But most cities do not have an F.C. Barcelona or Bayern Munich or Manchester United. These are among the ‘super clubs’ of Europe: they win more games, attract more supporters, and make more money than other clubs. These clubs were not always the juggernauts one sees today, however. This paper looks at how they emerged. It tells more of an economic story than a sporting one, recounting a narrative similar to that one might tell about the emergence of successful multinational companies. According to this narrative, super clubs rise by producing increasingly more complex products because of expanding productive capabilities, providing growing opportunities for economic spillovers in the process.

As indicated, this narrative focuses particularly on the ‘capabilities’ that have helped super clubs emerge. This focus draws on an emerging theory about economic complexity, which is used to frame the paper and is briefly introduced in section two (following an introduction to super clubs). The theory posits that production results from the creative combination of economic capabilities—or know-how. Some products require few common capabilities, are produced by everyone, and have relatively low value: like the average football club. Other products require many capabilities (including some that are rare), have high value, and are produced by a select group: like the super club. This theory is used to suggest two hypotheses about how football clubs become super:

• First, clubs do not become super by just producing better versions of the same products (a successful football team). Instead, over time, these clubs produce more complex, higher-value, globally consumed products.
• Second, clubs become super by accumulating new capabilities (or know-how) over time, manifest in new skills and people accessed through a range of ‘catalyst capabilities’ that source the skills. The catalyst capabilities include engagement mechanisms (through which skills are located and contracted), capital, infrastructure, and adaptive leadership.

These hypotheses are put to the test in this study. Section three discusses the method used in such analysis, which is a version of systematic process analysis. It involved tracking the rise of four (generally agreed) super clubs—F.C. Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, and Real Madrid—and two clubs that are potentially rising into this group—Manchester City and Swansea City. The work centered on identifying and examining key moments in the histories of the clubs, flushing out the factors that influenced their rise, and translating evidence into common narratives about how super clubs emerge. The findings are contrasted with evidence from historical experience in clubs that enjoy close proximity to the focal clubs but are (arguably) not ‘super clubs’ (like Espanyol, TSV 1860 Munich, Stockport County and Bury, and Rayo Vallecano).

Section four offers findings from the analysis. It shows, first, that all of the super clubs have indeed seen a ‘complexification’ of their product lines—moving progressively towards a more complex and diverse set of services and products revolving around the club ‘brand’. Second, the changes in production are clearly facilitated by expanded capabilities. These include expanded skills and people and catalyst capabilities like engagement mechanisms, capital, infrastructure, and adaptive leadership, which have all been growing with time:

• For instance, all of the clubs started with generalist players and managers but gradually employed specialist players and managers. This has led to the clubs now having large and highly diversified playing and non-playing personnel. The catchment area of this talent has also grown, with skills increasingly sourced from other countries and professions and sectors (showing that skills needed to be super come from a broad community).
• The engagement mechanisms through which new ‘skills and people’ were found are impressive. They include factors outside of the clubs’ control—like economic and political and legal changes that fostered the mobility of skills and people. They also include club-specific global scouting mechanisms, internal football academies, and networks of feeder clubs. Commercial linkages have also helped engage new business skills.
• Capital matters in all cases, and is manifest in both direct contributions of money and in the more general support of paying customers and sponsors willing to contribute to club coffers. Capital sources have diversified and became more complex over time in all the super clubs.
• Infrastructure capabilities also matter a great deal. Super clubs started out with small, locally accessible stadiums where they met, trained, played, and did everything else. Over time, however, the stadiums grew in size, were connected to transportation infrastructure that allowed greater accessibility beyond the local community (through regional roads and trains and even international airports) and added properties to allow for separated match, training, development, and business activities.
• A set of supporting capabilities inside and outside the clubs has also proved vital to foster the emergence of the more complex production in these clubs. These are called ‘adaptive leadership’ capabilities and manifest in clear actions of people in club and local government leadership—to respond to threats and opportunities, learn from other experiences, promote new vision in the face of opposition, establish formal and informal negotiation mechanisms and partnerships, and more.

A conclusion summarizes the paper’s findings by suggesting a simple acronym describing capabilities that foster the rise of super clubs: Special (Skilled People, Engagement mechanisms, Capital, Infrastructure, and Adaptive leadership). It summarizes the story about how emergent and expanded capabilities have fostered production complexity in these clubs, and draws conclusions about the likely capability differences between today’s average and great clubs. The ending commentary discusses how this study adds to literature on sports economics and the economics of complexity. It suggests ways in which future work can build on these contributions.

Despite the poor odds, low-income households in rural Thailand spend significant amounts on tickets of the Thai Government Lottery. One explanation might be that, due to lack of information about the properties of the game, the prospects of winning are upwardly biased. This would imply that an improved understanding of the actual odds should curb the demand for lottery tickets. We test this hypothesis in a randomized-controlled experiment in which we informed treated participants about the probability distribution of the Thai Government Lottery. The intervention leads to more precise perceptions of the lottery’s probability distribution. However, the willingness to pay for lottery tickets is not affected by this better knowledge. Non-cognitive aspects apparently play a more important role for participation decisions.

This paper studies whether there exists private information in the foreign exchange market, and whether speculation reduces or exacerbates volatility. It makes use of a recent data set on foreign currency positions by large market participants that include positions on options and other derivatives. This is the first data set that describes comprehensive currency positions of market participants. There are two main findings. First, not only the absolute value of the options position but also that of spot, forward and futures positions by large participants Granger-causes exchange rate volatility. This suggests that the large participants' currency speculation does not stabilize exchange rate volatility. Second, regression analyses do not find any positive association between large participants' position in a foreign currency with its subsequent appreciation. A non-parametric approach finds some weak support for a positive association but not on a systematic level. This casts into doubt the view that large participants have better information about the future movement of exchange rates. It further strengthens the case that the large players trade on noise rather than on information.

We divide the 102 historically developing countries (HDCs) into those with ‘very weak’, ‘weak’, ‘middle’, and ‘strong’ state capability. Analyzing the levels and recent growth rates of the HDCs’ capability for policy implementation reveals how pervasively “stuck” most of them are. Only eight HDCs have attained strong capability, and since most of these are small (e.g., Singapore, UAE), less than 100 million (or 1.7%) of the roughly 5.8 billion people in HDCs currently live in high capability states. Almost half (49) of these countries have very weak or weak capability, and thus their long-run pace of acquiring capability is also very slow. Alarmingly, three quarters of these countries (36 of 49) have experienced negative growth in state capability in recent decades, while more than a third of all countries (36 of 102) have low and (in the medium run at least) deteriorating state capability. At current rates, the ‘time to high capability’ of the 49 currently weak capability states and the 36 with negative growth is obviously “forever”. But even for the 13 with positive growth, only three would reach strong capability by the end of the 21st century at their current medium run growth.

On May 11th and 12th, 2009, Harvard Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) and the Sustainability Science Program (SSP) brought over 20 of the world’s leading experts from the fields of science, policy, and business to Cambridge, MA, to address the issues surrounding biofuel certification. This workshop on biofuels and certification was carried out as part of an ongoing collaboration between the ENRP and SSP to investigate policy options for the sustainable development of biofuels. The collaboration has focused on exploring whether, and if so, how, biofuels could be developed in ways that simultaneously help to meet the world’s energy needs, protect the environment, and advance the livelihoods of farmers and other land users around the world.

The workshop discussions were off-the-record, with each participant present in his or her own capacity, rather than representing an organization. This workshop was informed by the discussion at a session held in May 2008 at San Servolo Island, Venice, Italy that focused on the goals and concerns surrounding the use and production of biofuels. This summary report of the Workshop on Biofuel Certification represents a synthesis of the main points and arguments that emerged from the discussion. It does not represent a consensus document, since no effort was made at the Workshop to arrive at a single consensus view. Rather, the report reviews the major themes discussed and where there was significant disagreement, we have tried to present both sides of the argument.

The goals and concerns surrounding the debate over government policies related to the greater use and production of biofuels were addressed in an executive session convened by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Venice International University on May 19th and 20th, 2008. The session attracted more than 25 of the world's leading experts from the fields of policy, science, and business to San Servolo Island for an intensive two day session (see Appendix A for a list of the participants). The discussions were off-the-record, with each participant present in his or her own capacity, rather than representing an organization. The session was one in a series on Grand Challenges of the Sustainability Transition organized by the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University with the generous support of the Italian Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea. This particular session was held as part of the Ministry’s ongoing work with the Global Bioenergy Program established at the G8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005.

This summary report of the session is our synthesis of the main points and arguments that emerged from the discussions. It does not represent a consensus document, since no effort was made at the Session to arrive at a single consensus view. Rather, we report here on what we heard to be the major themes discussed at the session. Any errors or misrepresentations remain solely our responsibility.

This paper exploits a three-dimensional panel data set of prices on 27 traded goods, over 88 quarters, across 96 cities in the U.S. and Japan. We present evidence that the distribution of intranational real exchange rates is substantially less volatile and on average closer to zero, than the comparable distribution for international relative prices. We also show that an equally-weighted average of good-level real exchange rates tracks the nominal exchange rate well, suggesting strong evidence of sticky prices. We turn next to economic explanations for the dynamics of this so-called “Border” effect. Focusing on dispersion in prices between city pairs, we confirm previous findings that crossing national borders adds significantly to price dispersion. Using our point estimates crossing the U.S.-Japan “Border” is equivalent to adding between 2.5 and 13 million miles to the cross-country volatility of relative prices. We make a direct and explicit inference on the influence of shipping costs, distance, exchange rate and relative wage variability on the “Border” effect. In our calculations, the “Border” effect disappears after controlling for these additional variables.