A heightened focus on demonstrating development results has increased the stakes for evaluating impact (Stern 2015), while the more complex objectives and designs of international aid programmes make it ever more challenging to attribute effects to a particular intervention (Befani, Barnett and Stern 2014).
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Publications
This background report supported an event hosted in January 2015 by the Centre for Development Impact (CDI) – a joint initiative between the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Itad and the University of East Anglia (UEA) – with the objective of opening up the debate on ethics and exploring how it can become more relevant to the field of impact evaluation.
This workshop was supported by the Institute of Development Studies’ (IDS’) Department for International Development (DFID) Accountable Grant, with a view to start a dialogue around the use and application of ethics in impact evaluation.
This CDI Practice Paper by Giulia Mascagni provides a critical assessment of the literature on tax experiments to date.
It examines the main conceptual, methodological and data-related challenges, and provides practical reflections on how to move forward in low- and middle-income countries where this type of research is still underdeveloped.
It offers a guide for practitioners on the main challenges in quantitative research on tax compliance and on the methods used tackle them, which may be of interest for evaluation research more generally.
With the increase in resources that organisations are dedicating to evaluation the issue of evaluation quality has risen up the agenda and a growing number of commissioners are now looking at how to ensure the studies they commission are of sufficient quality.
This CDI Practice Paper by Julian Barr and Angela Christie brings together recent work at Itad to examine the origins of the concept of value for money (VFM) in the performance audit of public expenditure and its increasing prominence as a tool applied to support the management of publicly funded international development.
This CDI Practice Paper by Melanie Punton and Katharina Welle explains the methodological and theoretical foundations of process tracing, and discusses its potential application in international development impact evaluations.