Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

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Abstract:

The goal of most public agricultural research organizations is to undertake research and development work that will ultimately improve the productivity and sustainability of the agricultural and food sector. In today's world of scarce public funding and greater accountability, governments, donors and research managers are increasingly demanding assessment of the economic returns to their investments in research. There is a rich literature of economic impact assessment of agricultural research with evaluation studies that range widely in methods used, and in the breadth and scope of analysis undertaken. Alston, Norton, and Pardey (1995) is an excellent and comprehensive reference on the theory and practice of economic evaluation of research. In this paper, rather than dwell on the many finer and sometimes esoteric points in research methods, we summarize the ?state of the art? in ex post economic impact assessment of agricultural research with an emphasis on providing a practical guide that can be used by research managers and economists working within a research organization under tight time and resource constraints. The focus is on economic evaluation, recognizing that other papers in this series will provide an overview of social, institutional, and environmental evaluation. Nonetheless, the boundaries in these types of evaluations are blurred and, in this paper, we treat income distributional impacts of research (a social dimension) and touch on economic evaluation of research impacts on natural resources (an environmental dimension). In a paper of this scope, there will inevitably be biases and omissions. Much of the early part of the paper focuses on conceptual and methodological issues. Later sections of the paper turn to implementation issues, especially the implementation of impact assessment as a routine activity. Throughout, our focus is on public research organizations in developing countries, both national and international, and only in one section do we focus on the emphasize the special issues in international research organizations. The underlying premise is that evaluation work in the CGIAR should increasingly be based on evaluation work undertaken in NARSs, with IARCs providing a facilitating and synthetic role.