UDADISI

Social subjective poverty line

2012-02-23T20:25:00.000-08:00

Martin Ravallion has a new paper. He claims:

Until recently, most economists have resisted a seemingly obvious solution, namely to ask people themselves: “Do you feel poor?” . . .
. . . [T]he idea of a “social subjective poverty line” (below which people tend to think they are poor, but above which they do not) is arguably the most conceptually appealing way of defining poverty.

The paper provides a good discussion on how this framework would deal with the difference between absolute and relative poverty. One of my concerns is if the very poor would be able to understand the questions. Think about an indigenous person who does not speak English, or Spanish, but speaks Ticuna or Quiché -- there are some issues of translation, some concepts or categories might not translate well into some indigenous languages, and even into Mandarin, for example. I like Ravallion's approach but I think he should team up with some (economic) anthropologist or linguists to get the most out of this approach.

Police and Crime Against Firms in Developing Economies

2012-02-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

[O]ne standard deviation increase in the police force per 100,000 of population decreases losses due to crime by 0.029 standard deviations. We find that this negative relationship between police size and crime losses is stronger (more negative) in big cities, countries with high voter turnouts, high inequality, and firms that are owned and managed by a female than males.

That is the conclusion of a new "Police and Crime Against Firms in Developing Economies" by Islam, Asif. HT: Mark Lee.
What happens when the police is involved with criminal organizations? The authors controlled for quality of government, which might partially take care of that concern.

Quality of health aid

2012-02-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

Glassman and Duran from the Center of Global Development claim in their new paper, "An Index of the Quality of Official Development Assistance in Health:"

Abstract: Health is one of the largest and most complex aid sectors: 16 percent of all aid went to the health sector in 2009. While many stress the importance of aid effectiveness, there are limited quantitative analyses of the quality of health aid. In this paper, we apply Birdsall and Kharas’s Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) methodology to rank donors across 23 indicators of aid effectiveness in health. We present our results, track progress from 2008 to 2009, compare health to overall aid, discuss our limitations, and call for more transparent and relevant aid data in the sector level as well as the need to focuson impact and results. [Graphs are from the papers]. HT: SSRN.

The authors conclude:

It is, once again, very important to stress the caveats involved in our analysis: while we rank donors in four dimensions, and an overall dimension, these rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. We are publishing all of our data, code and results, so our readers can implement the weights they want or omit certain indicators and re-rank donors.

In the end, we see that what we leave out is as significant as what we include: every index, or ranking, omits crucial indicators, but in our case it could be debated that what we leave out is even more significant than what we include. Yet, given all these caveats, our principal aim is to generate a discussion over quantitative sector-level aid effectiveness measures, and let recipients hold donor agencies accountable.

The Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in November 2011, addressed certain issues such as transparency, aid in fragile states and the emergence of new donors, yet failed to address others such as the shift from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness (results). Effective health aid, as we have pointed out repeatedly in this paper, saves lives, and as donor funding flat lines and decreases, commitment to better outcomes must be reaffirmed. We hope the findings of this index nudge donors in the right way.

Education and drinking (evidence from Australian twins)

2012-02-23T06:18:00.002-08:00

We relate differences in problem drinking symptoms within pairs of identical twins to their respective differences in years of schooling. Isolating in this way the influences of family background and genes, we find that an increase in schooling attainment results in a significantly lower incidence of problem drinking for men. Thus, an extra year of schooling reduces the number of health problems caused by drinking by 0.14, and the probability of developing symptoms of Alcohol Dependence (AD) by 0.06. This negative link is robust to a variety of modifications to the identifying assumptions underlying our statistical analysis. Socio-economic implications of our findings are discussed.

That is the abstract of the paper "The effect of schooling on problem drinking: evidence from Australian twins" in the latest Applied Economics. A draft is here.

Are these kind of benefits included in measures of returns to education?

Some Views on Decentralization

2012-02-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

. . . broadly defined:

A negative view (India), a positive view (Bolivia), an endogenous view (China), and a positive cross-country view.

Do Economists Lie More?

2012-02-22T05:29:00.001-08:00

Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other majors. This is true even after controlling for subjects’ beliefs about the overall rate of deception, which predict behavior very well: Although B&E subjects expect most others to lie in our decision problem, the effect of major remains. An instrumental variables analysis suggests that the effect is not simply one of selection: It seems that studying B&E has a causal impact on behavior.

That is the abstract of a new paper by Raúl López-Pérez and Eli Spiegelman.

Another argument for a code of ethics in the profession? See a review of a book on ethics for economists here. Do you know of other recent articles on ethics in economics? Thanks!

Social Entrepreneur of the day

2012-02-21T07:21:00.000-08:00

About.

Corruption and the Internet

2012-02-20T18:47:00.002-08:00

In a new paper, The Effect of Internet Access on Government Corruption, Martha Garcia-Murillo claims:

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the effect that Internet access in a country has on the level of government corruption by studying a cross section of approximately 170 countries. The papers’ main model includes political, economic, and technological factors that can affect corruption perception. The technological factors focus on Internet access. The weighted least square statistical results indicate that the Internet is having a positive effect on reducing corruption perception around the world; political factors such as red tape, good governance and freedom of the press appear to have a greater impact than economic factors, of which only the income level was significant.

Charles Dickens, Economist

2012-02-20T10:23:00.004-08:00

Source.

In Honduras, a Catastrophe Long Foretold

2012-02-20T04:46:00.001-08:00

Mark Ungar claims in a NYT article referring to the recent fire in a prison in Honduras:

With more than 80 homicides per 100,000 people (compared to about 5 in the United States), Honduras has the world’s highest official homicide rate, according to the United Nations. The country is saturated by gang violence. Drug traffickers control many of the state agencies responsible for fighting the gangs, as well as the territory of the country’s six northern states.

The fire in the prison that killed more than 300 inmates is sad and lamentable. Ungar concludes:

. . . [C]riminal investigation must be improved so that more cases are brought to court. The abysmally low percentage of violent crimes that actually lead to trials — fewer than 5 percent, by some estimates — can be increased through crime mapping; improving the quality of police reports; and support for citizen initiatives to provide crime statistics.

I would like to see improvements in these areas. However they seem unlikely because as the author argues "Drug traffickers control many of the state agencies . . ."

It is interesting that the author does not mention in the article that drug trafficking is driven by the drugs demand in the US.

The economic incentives for drug trafficking are so high that probably the only long term solution is drug legalization in the region. Of course this is a complex issue, especially when one thinks about how to legalize it, what to legalize, etc.

It was a step in the right direction when the president of Guatemala said he wanted to make drugs legal in the region. The topic of drug legalization used to be a taboo in Guatemala, for example. Nowadays however more and more people are looking at it as one of the few ways out, if not the only one [I was against legalization in the past but the death toll is just too high]. When one looks at the literature on drug prohibition and violence the conclusion is very clear. In previous post on the link between drugs and violence I have looked at some research and commentaries. For example:

[i]ncreasing drug law enforcement is unlikely to reduce drug market violence.

The war on drugs increases drug-trade related violence.

The fundamental problem is that drugs are illegal.

What happened to the microinsurance revolution?

2012-02-19T19:19:00.001-08:00

In 2004 Jonathan Morduch said:

To be workable, solutions will have to address the very practical issues that have arisen repeatedly in discussions of microinsurance. The first is the need for reinsurance, the second is having data on which to base premiums, and the third is the ability to cut the costs of dealing with many small transactions.

He concluded:

A micro-insurance revolution could be a major step toward improving the well-being of the world’s poor, but, it is important to design products with a full picture of how the products will fit into clients’ lives (and possibly affect non-clients too). In that light, we should also bear in mind that micro-saving can be a key part of a household’s best insurance strategy.

In a 2011 paper Christian Biener and Martin Eling indicate:

We review 131 papers and find that the most severe problems stem from insufficient resources for risk evaluation, small size of insurance groups, information asymmetries, and the size of the insurance premium.

They conclude:

Setting up microinsurers as cooperatives may be a way of combining the advantages of large institutions (e.g., diversification, economies of scale, and access to reinsurance) with those of local organizations (e.g., low transaction costs, access to information, and social enforcement mechanisms).

It seems that microinsurance as a product still isn't well understood by the clients/beneficiaries (see here). It seems also that training does not work that well for people to make the decision, but marketing does work (see here). There are some positive experiences (see here). And some critics (see here).

It remains an open and contested field for researchers and a possible opportunity for entrepreneurs and practitioners.

"health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation"

2012-02-19T15:47:00.002-08:00

Dr. Devi Shetty says:

Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That’s what we’re doing in health care [in India]. What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation. Source.

Writing about people

2012-02-19T12:42:00.001-08:00

This is another review of Katherine's Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Irin Carmon:

Boo says now, “When we talk about accountability and implementation, even when I say those words, they’re just such eye-glazers. But that’s really what it’s about. It’s not that everybody in power wants to have a world in which somebody who is slowly dying on the road gets passed by. It’s that there’s so little work done to make (sure what) happens in Delhi or in Washington actually gets to the people it’s intended to. Whether it’s when I was reported on group homes for the developmentally disabled” — the work that won her a Pulitzer — “it was the same thing. The money just ended up circulating among the already privileged.”

But Boo is a reporter and a storyteller, and she doesn’t have a policy prescription, per se. She does believe that “statistics about the poor sometimes have a tenuous relationship to lived experience,” as she writes at the end of the book, adding, “I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.”

. . .

So she spent three years in Annawadi, interviewing and reinterviewing children and men and women with the help of a team of interpreters and a Flipcam. Of the interpreters, she says, “I had a bunch of false starts. People weren’t used to working in the style that I work, patient watching and listening. The days would feel pointless to other people, like, ‘Why are we sitting here all day watching this kid sort garbage,’ somebody might say. The conditions are bad.” (One of the main geographical features of Annawadi is a giant sewage lake.)

The power of observation and conversation . . .
HT: William Easterly .

Africa - Brazil relations

2012-02-19T08:27:00.001-08:00

. . . [t]he results of a study to be published this year on the viability of ethanol production in some African countries will create opportunities for joint investments by Brazilian and African companies.

Mining and infrastructure investments have already grown substantially. A successful case of cooperation is the agreement recently signed between Brazil’s Vale Mining Company and the government of Malawi for the construction of a railway line through the Nacala Corridor, stretching from Mozambique to Zambia and crossing Malawi.

The building of this railroad – to transport minerals and commodities – will create jobs for the local population and improve their standard of living given that social development projects will be implemented throughout the corridor. Vale is expected to invest a total of US$ 4.4 billion in this project.

Relations between Africa and Brazil are not limited to economic investments, however. They also involve an exchange of knowledge and practical experiences in areas crucial for development and growth.

That is by Sasana Carrillo. HT: IDS

Social Enterprise Watch

2012-02-18T15:57:00.000-08:00

1) A new article by Meng Zhao discusses the emergence of social enterprise in China:

The concept of social enterprise is now emerging in China. But it is not yet widely known to the general public or regularly covered by mainstream media. The Chinese government is still trying to understand the new phenomenon and formulate policies toward it. It is choosing neither to promote nor to restrict the discussion and practice of social enterprises, as opposed to the nonprofit sector, which is the subject of significant administrative focus.

. . .

Businesspeople and government authorities are still suspicious of the nonprofit sector and, laterally, social enterprises. Ding Kaijie, the head of the social innovation research division at the CCCP’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, explains: “The reality is that NPOs have low accountability and social trust. In the course of NPO development in China, a few bad cases raised great concerns among people and government agencies. If NPOs were commercialized, we could hardly tell them apart from for-profit businesses. There would be doubt about their commitments to social good.... Thus some officials think that the commercialization of NPOs is a mistake.”

2) This short piece by Narda R. Quigley examines the motivation of social entrepreneurs vs. commercial entrepreneurs:

. . . [S]ocial entrepreneurs would be focused more on setting high goals when it came to having an impact on people and communities. Commercial entrepreneurs, on the other hand, would likely be focused more on goals reflecting financial growth.

3) Check out the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship (some articles are "free access").

4) I wrote this syllabus.

Book review of the day: James Tooley's "The Beautiful Tree"

2012-02-18T08:06:00.002-08:00

Pamela Stubbart writes:

According to Tooley, development experts are mostly either unaware of the existence of low-cost private schools, or they criticize them on a few main grounds, including that the teachers are uncertified and low-paid, that the facilities are inadequate, and that the education received is of low quality. However, there is no reason to believe that the low-cost private schools are in general any worse than the public schools in these regards . . . keep reading.

The book. HT: Kevin Grier.

On the things that economists talk about while having lunch

2012-02-18T07:13:00.001-08:00

The intention of this essay is to demonstrate the utility of economists and the range of their potential scientific contributions. We do this by considering an alternative history of the Pythagorean theorem, c2 = a2 + b2, for which the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos is given credit for discovering. We argue that, at worst, philosophers of science in the tradition of understanding mankind’s propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange” would have eventually discovered it. In the absence of another scholar providing the above theorem, chances are good that it would be studied as the “Solow theorem,” an equation which would have predicted the hypotenuse without residual.

That is from the paper "Could Bob Solow Have Replaced Pythagoras? An Alternate Universe Where Economists Solve the Problem of Right-Triangles" by Ross and Duncan.

The authors say:

For the time and discussion from which this paper was designed the authors would like to express their appreciation to the institution of lunch, which is yet another idea economists would have invented had they been given the chance.

:) :)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

2012-02-17T14:03:00.000-08:00

Mumbai, for its marvelous rebirth, remains the largest city in an India that, in spite of being “an increasingly affluent and powerful nation … still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet.” With the wealth of India’s top 100-richest equaling almost a quarter of the country’s GDP, today’s gap between top and bottom is virtually unfathomable.

That is from Terry Hong's book review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. See another review here.

Why SMEs don't go public?

2012-02-17T06:36:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting paper (by Caccavaio et al) on SMEs in Italy. The authors claim in the concluding remarks:

It is well known that the size of Italian firms is small if compared with the size of firms operating in other industrialized countries. This study confirms the intuition that the Italian economic system does not provide firms with the right incentives to grow: more precisely, this study suggests that Italian entrepreneurs keep their firms small in order to rationally respond to a set of distortive incentives provided by legislation (for example, about labor market and unions), regulation (for example, about accounting standards and tax procedures), and industrial policies.

Some robust findings:

1. Both the firms and the institutional investors recognize the importance of being listed on regulated markets to favor investments and to improve international visibility; however, both recognize that listing is costly.

2. Institutional investors think that the major obstacles to the access of SMEs to regulated markets are:

i. The fear of entrepreneurs of losing total control over firms;

ii. The willingness of entrepreneurs of retaining informal managerial practices;

iii. The lack of financial literacy;

iv. Both the firms and the institutional investors think that there is no need of having many SME-dedicated markets;

3. Both the firms and the institutional investors claim that the Italian economic system lacks stability in terms of regulation, thus making long term strategies difficult to be implemented.

In Latin America we have so much in common with countries like Italy and Spain that it seems these results apply also to the SMEs in the LA region.

The "Journal of Economic Perspectives" in a few sentences

2012-02-16T17:31:00.002-08:00

It is difficult to substantiate a pervasive Energy Efficiency Gap in the US. Paper.
The creation of a smarter transmission and distribution grids in the US seems pretty uncertain. Paper.
As it is today nuclear power is not cost-effective in the US. Paper.
"Generating electricity from renewable sources is more expensive than conventional approaches but reduces pollution externalities." Paper.
"Over the next 25 to 30 years, nearly all of the growth in energy demand, fossil fuel use, associated local pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions is forecast to come from the developing world." Paper. I have a post on this one.
A carbon tax or a cap-and-trade policy are more desirable to address externalities created by petroleum fuels in the US economy but they are not politically feasible; the hope lies on new technologies. Paper.
For-profit education institutions been the fastest-growing in the higher education sector in the US, they have a deeper reach but unemployment among their students is the highest. Paper.
College in the US is a lottery. Paper.
The US higher education is in transition (tuition, faculty composition, etc.), as a consequence getting Ph.D.s will be less attractive. Paper.
"After controlling for skill differences and incorporating employer costs for benefits packages, we find that, on average, public sector workers in state government have compensation costs 3-10 percent greater than those for workers in the private sector, while in local government the gap is 10-19 percent." Paper.

The US focus is obvious. (1) and (2) call for more research specially using RCTs [ideas for dissertation research]. I name this number of the JEP: the uncertain one . . . only (5), (10), and probably (3) bring some straight conclutions. I guess that shows how slowly economics advances (or it tells how hazy the energy and education future of the US looks like).

Energy consumption in the Developing and Developed Worlds

2012-02-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

The charts are from the article "How Will Energy Demand Develop in the Developing World?" by Wolfram, Shelef, and Gertler.

Much of the energy consumption comes from cars and refrigerators. For example, in Mexico:

Notice the S-shaped in energy consumption as annual consumption increases. Don't miss the table that reports the electrification rates in countries where the most people live without electricity. China is not in the list, electrification rate in China is nearly 100 per cent.

The authors argue that as a consequence of this nearly all of the growth in energy demand, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions will come from the developing world. One can anticipate even more intense debates over the environment and economic growth.

Social Enterprise of the day

2012-02-16T05:14:00.003-08:00

The Posse Foundation.

The concept of a Posse works for both students and college campuses and is rooted in the belief that a small, diverse group of talented students—a Posse—carefully selected and trained, can serve as a catalyst for increased individual and community development. [From its website].

Form today's NYT:

Most Posse Scholars would not have qualified for their colleges by the normal criteria. Posse Scholars’ median combined SAT score is only 1056, while the median combined score at the colleges Posse students attend varies from 1210 to 1475. Nevertheless, they succeed. Ninety percent of Posse Scholars graduate — half of them on the dean’s list and a quarter with academic honors. A survey (pdf) of 20 years of alumni found that nearly 80 percent of the respondents said they had founded or led groups or clubs. There are only 40 Posse Scholars among Bryn Mawr’s 1,300 students, but a Posse student has won the school’s best all-around student award three times in the past seven years. Posse is changing the way universities look at qualifications for college, and what makes for college success.

A Posse fellow says:

The posse was key. “It’s so easy to get lost. I couldn’t imagine going to college without a group of people I already knew. I don’t think I would have made it.” They were all studying different things, she said. They didn’t do homework together, but they held each other accountable for doing it. “If you needed somebody to get you out of bed and get you to the library, Antoinette” — a Posse member — “would get you to the library.” The Posse members, she said, held each other up to the standard they had set: “how are you doing in class, how you behaved socially and whether you were supporting people you agreed to support.”

[She] graduated in 2009, cum laude. Conscious of her good fortune and eager to give back, she joined Teach for America and taught 6th grade social studies at a KIPP charter school in Newark. Now she is in graduate school at Columbia, studying theater.

Poverty and terrorism

2012-02-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000–06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.

That is the abstract of the paper "Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism" (draft 2009) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora, published in the latest number of The Journal of Politics.

Democracy and human development

2012-02-15T13:45:00.001-08:00

Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series—cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.

That is the abstract of a new paper by Gerringa, Thackera, and Alfaro. It was published in the latest number of The Journal of Politics.

Evidence-Based Policy

2012-02-15T06:08:00.002-08:00

I reached the American Journal of Evaluation via Pablo Rodriguez. In the December 2011 there is an interesting and relevant article titled "Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns: The Predicament of Evidence-Based Policy" by Pawson, Wong, and Owen, an early draft is here. The paper discusses the complexities of evidence-based policy - it is not as straight forward as I had thought.

The abstract of the paper:

The authors present a case study examining the potential for policies to be “evidence-based.” To what extent is it possible to say that a decision to implement a complex social intervention is warranted on the basis of available empirical data? The case chosen is whether there is sufficient evidence to justify banning smoking in cars carrying children. The numerous assumptions underpinning such legislation are elicited, the weight and validity of evidence for each is appraised, and a mixed picture emerges. Certain propositions seem well supported; others are not yet proven and possibly unknowable. The authors argue that this is the standard predicament of evidence-based policy. Evidence does not come in finite chunks offering certainty and security to policy decisions. Rather, evidence-based policy is an accumulative process in which the data pursue but never quite capture unfolding policy problems. The whole point is the steady conversion of “unknowns” to “knowns.”

According to the authors programs are complex because:

Programmes are active, not passive. Interventions do not work in and of themselves; they only have affect through the reasoning and reactions of their recipients.

Programmes have long implementation chains and multiple stakeholders. Recipients are many and varied; reactions to programmes thus differ; outcomes are thus generally mixed.

Programmes are embedded in complex social systems. Recipients are rooted in different localities, institutions, cultures, histories, all of which shape the fortunes of a programme.

Programmes are implemented amidst the turbulence of other interventions. The policy agenda is delivered through a multitude of interventions, each one interfering with the reception of another.

Programmes beg, steal, borrow and adapt. Practitioners work constantly to improve the delivery of interventions rather than preserving uniformity to meet evaluation and trial requirements.

Programmes are the offspring of previous interventions. Social problems are longstanding; interventions evolve to try to combat them; the success of a current scheme depends on its history.

Programmes change the conditions that make them work in the first place. An intervention’s success is always time limited since alleviating a problem always involves changing its concomitant causes.

Their conclusions:

There is no such thing as a typical policy intervention or a quintessential programme. Legislative instruments of the type considered here are worlds away from interventions based on, say, financial incentives or peer learning. But what they all have in common is a sprawl of ambitions, stakeholders, localities and histories. In this respect, evidence-based policy has to deal with a standard predicament. Research synthesis can only provide partial information on the medley of issues that face the decision maker. That information, as here, is likely to draw upon inquiry conducted in diverse research traditions – toxicology, social psychology, political science, socio-legal studies, etc. Accordingly, that information is also likely to be partial in research quality and political leanings. So what does this tell us about the warrant of evidence?

. . .

Evidence does not come in finite chunks offering certainty and security to policy decisions. Programmes and interventions spring into life as ideas about how to change the world for the better. Evaluation research allows us to refine those explanations and systematic review allows a refinement of those refinements. The review process should be understood as a means of building, adjudicating and extrapolating programme theories. Evidence based policy will only mature when it is understood that it is a continuous, accumulative process in which the data pursues but never quite draws level with unfolding policy problems. The whole point is the steady conversion of ‘unknowns’ to ‘knows’.

It may well be that policy makers are too busy, too stubborn or too stupid to digest the significance of the qualifications and contingencies that govern whether a policy will work (this subject is much studied but not pursued in this paper). Nevertheless we arrive at the inescapable, long-and-short of it – evidence-based policy deals in conditional truths and provisional explanations.