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From Terence Wood on Doing well by doing good: foreign aid improves opinions of the US
Thanks for your comment Stephen,
As an empirical puzzle whether aid improves opinions is not easy to answer. The challenge here is reverse causality. Thanks to the Gallup World Poll good data from around the developing world exist on publics' opinions of donor countries. And thanks to the OECD DAC's database and other donor publications we have good data on aid flows. But we learn little from regressing amounts of aid on public opinion looking for correlations. This is because, just as it is possible that aid is influencing people's opinion in recipient countries, it is equally plausible that opinions of donor countries influence how much aid is given in the first place. Maybe donors give more money to countries where they are unpopular to try and gain influence. Or maybe they give less, saving the money to reward allies. These possibilities make it much harder to answer questions about aid's impact on opinion.
In the QJPS study we attempted to resolve the issue of reverse causality and shed at least some light on aid's impact in fostering favourable opinions of donors. Specifically focusing PEPFAR, afforded a neat piece of methodological leverage. It enabled us to use instrumental variables to overcome the problem of reverse causality. We were able to use HIV incidence as a tool to estimate the amount of PEPFAR funding which was given for reasons completely independent of existing public opinions of the United States. And these estimates were able to be used, in turn, to estimate PEPFAR's impact on opinion. We ran two stage least squared regressions with a suite of control variables to ensure results weren't being driven by other factors. And it's from the results of these which our findings came.
With regards to your second question the paper linked to in the last para of the first blog post does this to an extent.
Thanks again
Terence
From Panio on Benefits from mining in Papua New Guinea – where do they go?
Thanks for this, it provide exact answers for all students.
From Stephen Norman on Doing well by doing good: foreign aid improves opinions of the US
Terence et al,
Very interesting findings, but do you think you could briefly explain the study in a little more detail? In particular, how exactly did you show that the PEPFAR program has lead to improved perceptions of the US in recipient countries?
Also, does you paper discuss how or to what extent fostering positive perceptions among foreign publics might lead to enhanced international standing?
From Stephen Howes on The Australian volunteer evaluation and the capacity building straitjacket (part 2)
Hi Jo, I don't have a precise definition, and would welcome your thoughts. I guess an organization's capacity is its ability to get things done, so if you are developing the capacity of an organization you are helping it to be able to get more things done. That could be achieved in many ways. I wouldn't define capacity development so that it excludes skills transfer which is what the evaluation does.Skills transfer must be the most obvious way volunteers can contribute to capacity development, so excluding it when you are trying to examine whether volunteers do contribute to capacity development seems very odd indeed.
From Somal on Fiji’s economic prospects: closing the confidence deficit
Reading this article has given me some idea on the policy switch. Sir, can you please abridge on the reason for the policy switch and the impact on agriculture, industry and the service sector?
From Jo Spratt on A sinking atoll nation and quarter million dollar nurses: where to next for the Kiribati Australia Nursing Initiative (KANI)?
Awesome, Jesse. Thanks for that. Happy to collaborate on a blog, although I'm not sure what I'd have to contribute without actually doing some research into the issue. Feel free to get in touch via Devpolicy - be great to talk more.
From Jesse Doyle on A sinking atoll nation and quarter million dollar nurses: where to next for the Kiribati Australia Nursing Initiative (KANI)?
Jo,
Many thanks for your comments. I agree that it deserves further enquiry. I spent some time in the Philippines last year studying their nursing colleges. There is obviously a huge degree of variation in the costs of a nursing degree in the Philippines depending on whether it's public or private, but one year of tuition fees in Australia could in most cases cover an entire degree's worth of tuition fees in the Philippines. The living costs are also evidently much lower. There are some nursing courses offered in Tagalog, but many are offered in English and to a very high standard. As with NZ, in order to gain entry to Australia they are required to pass a nursing competency test along with an IELTS language proficiency test. This would add to the overall cost, but still amount to a fraction of the average cost for a KANI graduate at present. Given your background as an RN, it might be worth us writing a collaborative blog further exploring this idea.
From Jo Spratt on The Australian volunteer evaluation and the capacity building straitjacket (part 2)
Thanks Stephen - really useful posts. I'm curious - how do you define capacity development?
From Sarah Kirk on The Australian volunteer evaluation and the capacity building straitjacket (part 1)
I wonder about organizations that continue to get repeat volunteers for very similar positions. Once a resource mobilization officer has left and been deemed a success, they are swiftly replaced by a donor liaison officer who in turn is deemed a success - just in time for the next resource mobilization officer, or for variety, communications professional with grant writing experience!
From Ashlee Betteridge on The Australian volunteer evaluation and the capacity building straitjacket (part 1)
As a 20-something person that tried and failed at this, I can only agree Patrick! I think the bar is being set too high here for something that people ultimately sign up for out of a sense of goodwill. Volunteers aren't consultants. As the evaluation shows, in many ways this is why they are so valuable. They can achieve things that consultants cannot. If a volunteer manages to develop the long-term capacity of a host organisation, then good on them, that is wonderful--but it shouldn't be the expectation.
From Philip Jan van der Eyk on ODE on whole of government approaches to law and justice: where’s the evidence?
Tracey,
A well written critique and full marks for identifying the elephant in the room in your opening remarks under "how convincing is the evidence?".
A couple of years ago I was developing a Phd topic in the area of causal impact evaluation of social programs and in particular that of the PNG law and justice sector.
The ODE study was then in the making (and had been all ready a long time in the making) and was eagerly awaited by the industry. On publication I was gobsmacked to find that not only was PNG not the star case study but was omitted altogether. In my view the report was accordingly significantly diminished, hardly worth reading as a serious contribution to our understanding of the sector and a true discredit to ODE.
In south west Pacific area law and justice terms, that is, our back yard, PNG is the only show in town and a show that disturbingly the Australian government now seems keen to distance itself from.
Philip Jan van der Eyk
From Ken Caldwell on Australia’s aid ranking takes a tumble