Beyond Rate of Return: Reorienting Project Appraisal

Evaluating Preschool Programs When Length of Exposure to the Program Varies: A Nonparametric Approach

“…The modal number of years of education for these males is 8. 46 The 25% figure is based on studies such as Devarajan, Squire, and Suthiwart-Narueput (1997), Feldstein (1995), and Harberger (1997. As seen in the table, even with this adjustment the cost-benefit ratios are substantially greater than 1.…”

Evidence of Impact of Interventions on Growth and Development during Early and Middle Childhood

“…If parents have to take their children to health clinics to receive interventions, resource costs are incurred in the form of transportation costs and the costs of the parents' time, in addition to the public resource costs of the clinic. In addition, there are likely to be distortion costs from raising funds to finance public expenditures; these distortion costs have been estimated to be approximately 25 percent of public expenditures (Devarajan, Squire, and Suthiwart-Narueput 1997). If only service provider costs are incorporated into the analyses, total resource costs are likely to be understated.…”

A simple technology for poverty-oriented project assessment

“…The welfare economics literature treats it, in many cases, deeply but not in the comparative manner of Table 9 recently, did not consider fungibility or its prevention, treating it by implication as a 'macro' issue: hence most aid-funded projects emerged from microevaluation as successes, but regression analysis of macro-aid effectiveness (until the 1990s) branded aid as a failure! The paper by Devarajan et al (1997) finally attempts to come to terms with fungibility but does not propose methods for its prevention. Note that, before this, Kanbur (1991) had made a strong plea for extending the scope of project analysis to adjustment lending (policy reform) operations.…”