S4 Ep1: The evidence gap on evidence use

Development economics has built a large empirical evidence base across a range of topics and policies – but how, when and where is it being used? We often assume that evidence will have an impact, but have surprisingly few answers to these key questions.Michelle Rao, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, joins us for the first episode of our new Ideas in Development series on evidence. We discuss her own research on these questions, which looks at whether evaluations of conditional cash transfers in Latin American and Caribbean countries influenced government spending. Then we cover what we currently know about the routes from research to impact, why the political economy of evidence use has been so under-studied, and what a research agenda on evidence use should look like.Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/Check out Michelle’s research: https://www.michellerao.com/research