The Bolivian Social Investment Fund: An Analysis of Baseline Data for Impact Evaluation

Abstract

The Bolivian Social Investment Fund (SIF) is a financial institution that promotes sustainable investments in the social sectors, principally in the areas of health, education, and sanitation. This article shows how to use pre intervention data collected for evaluating the SIF to improve the targeting of a program, to test the quality of the evaluation design, and to define corrective measures if necessary. It finds that among SIF interventions the benefits in education are distributed relatively equally over the population, while the investments in health and sanitation favor better-off communities. The article contributes to the methods used to evaluate social investment funds and similar programs. It compares two types of evaluation designs to assess social investment fund interventions in the education sector. The authors demonstrate that a simple matched comparison design introduces a bias in the estimate of the program effect, whereas an experimental design based on random assignment does not. With pre intervention data, the analyst can select a quasi or indirect experiment, where the choice of the indirect experiment coincides with the selection of valid instrumental variables. The availability of pre intervention data makes it possible to compare the two types of evaluation designs as well as to test the validity of the instruments and to determine the loss of efficiency due to the use of quasi-experimental techniques instead of random treatment assignment.