This study draws on a rigorous systematic review—to our knowledge the first in this area—to take stock of the literature on aid and democracy. It asks: Does aid—especially democracy aid—have positive impact on democracy? How? What factors most...
Over the past two decades, research on the impacts of a diverse range of public policies and income inequality has seen rapid growth. Despite the large number of publications to date, there remain important lacunae in our understanding of how policy...
Over the last 35 years, microfinance has been generally regarded as an effective policy tool in the fight against poverty. Yet, the question of whether access to credit leads to poverty reduction and improved wellbeing remains open. To address this...
In 2006 the Center for Global Development’s report ‘When Will We Ever Learn? Improving lives through impact evaluation’ bemoaned the lack of rigorous impact evaluations. The authors of the present paper researched international organizations and...
We examine how impact evaluation (IE) and associated syntheses contribute to evidence generation in low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries. We interviewed over 50 individuals from relevant organisations and five LMIC countries and drew on data from...
This working paper provides a summary of three systematic reviews on the effectiveness of aid in Afghanistan, Mali, and South Sudan between 2008 and 2021. These three countries, like all other highly fragile countries, suffer from bad governance...
Despite the good intentions behind affirmative action policies to mediate ‘horizontal inequalities’ between ethnic groups, the evidence on their effectiveness remains open to debate. In this study, we conduct a systematic review of the literature...
This paper provides a systematic review of quantitative literature investigating the success of affirmative action policies in addressing socio-economic inequalities between ethnic groups in education and employment. We focus on two of the most...
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