Evidence-based Policy Research Research Articles

The evidence-based policy research strategy for digital economy development

The evidence-based policy research strategy for digital economy development

Structural change in the South African agricultural sector: Bai-Perron modelling

There is a consensus that the agricultural sector in developing countries has ascendancy in elevating economic growth through structural change; hence continued improvements are imperative, especially in the case of countries such as South Africa with a low agricultural GDP contribution to the economy. Policymakers have to keep a handle on structural change issues. However, the dawdling research on structural change, particularly in the agricultural sector in South Africa, causes a fallback on the sector's development due to the absence of quality evidence-based policy research. This study analysed structural breaks in the agricultural sector using the value of agricultural production as a variable and then evaluated the effects of economic factors such as employment, exports, government expenditure, and inflation on the value of agricultural production output in the presence of each significant structural break between 1983 and 2020. The Bai-Perron test forecasted two structural break dates (1988 and 1994) in South Africa's agricultural sector. The model results reveal that agricultural exports positively influenced the value of agricultural production output in the resulting two structural change regimes, while employment in agriculture, government expenditure in agriculture, and inflation positively influenced the value of agricultural production output only in the regime 1994–2020. The recommendation is that policy reforms aimed at boosting agricultural exports should be pursued.

Building back better tourism sector post-COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia: input-output and simulation analysis

ABSTRACT This study, by employing an input-output and simulation analysis, aims to examine policies to build back better the tourism sector's post-COVID-19 pandemic by taking Indonesia as a case study. The result confirms that to build back a better tourism sector in the post-COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Indonesia needs to maintain the supply of domestic inputs used as the primary source of intermediate inputs in the tourism sector and other sectors related to the tourism sector. The simulation analysis indicated that the worst effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tourism industry occurred in output reduction compared with the value-added and labor income losses. However, the government needs close collaboration with the private sector and other wide-range tourism stakeholders in determining tourism policies post-COVID-19 pandemic, apart from the importance of evidence-based policy research. This study contributes to international comparative policy research in the tourism field post-COVID-19 pandemic.

Using Administrative Data for Evidence-Based Policy Research

Using Administrative Data for Evidence-Based Policy Research

Understanding, negotiating and navigating the politicisation of evidence-based policy research: the case of Irish research on lone parent labour market activation policy

Utilising a case study of evidence-based policy (EBP) commissioned by government we explore how academic outputs can serve several purposes, depending on the political milieu and the values and ideologies of any given party. Our commissioned research was being carried out in the context of significant policy change for lone parents in Ireland which saw the introduction of labour market activation. The research was initially used by the then Government to appease the Opposition to the highly emotive policy change. Following a general election, Opposition and advocacy groups called on policymakers to acknowledge the report they had commissioned. Concepts of research(er) deficit, normative reality and a shifting ‘policy agora’ are explored to highlight how the political context shaped the uptake of the research findings. We followed the debate by drawing on publicly available documentary evidence relevant to the policy of lone parent activation in Ireland from pertinent parliamentary and committee debates involving all stakeholders, that is the Government, civil servants, Opposition and advocacy groups, to ascertain what happened with the research and why did it happen. Attention is given to the consequences of producing outputs that diverge from political values and ideologies, whereby research can be subject to manipulation to discredit and invalidate findings.

The PSID in Research and Policy.

The PSID has remained a valuable vehicle for evidence-based policy research for decades and should remain so for many more. In this short review, I cover major policy-related strengths from PSID research in the areas of event history analysis; mobility and volatility; cross national comparisons; health and health insurance; mobility into and out of poverty; the effects of parental income on children; and the use of the child development sample to broaden the PSID policy focus in new and interesting ways. I also include the emerging study of longer term intergenerational patterns of mobility and transfer, including across three generations. Finally, I take up the question of how PSID data and methods could be further improved to make the survey more valuable to public policy, focusing on administrative data linkages.

Evidence-Based Policy Research to Inform the ENP: Five Recommendations for Europe and its Neighbours

Motivated by neoliberal normativism, the ENP drew on a now outdated mix of political and economic reasoning that does not reflect recent scientific evidence on regional development, and is compromised by having been formulated at arms-length from implementing contexts. An expansion of the ENP discourse that builds upon research findings and sustained feedback with field experts in neighbourhood countries is thought to increase the probability of long-term policy success. Rather than trade liberalisation as the primary stimulant, the results specifically suggest innovation support as the default strategy, and migration policy structures to back labour and capital flows.

Malaysia's National Higher Education Research Institute (IPPTN): narrowing the research-policy gap in a dynamic higher education system

Policy decision-making in Malaysia has long used an approach based on intuition, ideology, or conventional wisdom. But as Malaysian society matures within an increasingly complex policy environment, a move toward an evidence-based approach to public policy-making is called for. This paper discusses the experience of the National Higher Education Research Institute (IPPTN) in its attempts at linking research to higher education policy formulation. The main aim is to understand the perspectives of the IPPTN researchers regarding the use and impact of higher education research on policy-making, and the challenges they experienced. The findings provide insights into the future of evidence-based higher education policy-making in Malaysia and the IPPTN's capacity and capability for evidence-based policy research.

New directions in evidence-based policy research: a critical analysis of the literature.

Despite 40 years of research into evidence-based policy (EBP) and a continued drive from both policymakers and researchers to increase research uptake in policy, barriers to the use of evidence are persistently identified in the literature. However, it is not clear what explains this persistence – whether they represent real factors, or if they are artefacts of approaches used to study EBP. Based on an updated review, this paper analyses this literature to explain persistent barriers and facilitators. We critically describe the literature in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, definitions of ‘evidence’, methods, and underlying assumptions of research in the field, and aim to illuminate the EBP discourse by comparison with approaches from other fields. Much of the research in this area is theoretically naive, focusing primarily on the uptake of research evidence as opposed to evidence defined more broadly, and privileging academics’ research priorities over those of policymakers. Little empirical data analysing the processes or impact of evidence use in policy is available to inform researchers or decision-makers. EBP research often assumes that policymakers do not use evidence and that more evidence – meaning research evidence – use would benefit policymakers and populations. We argue that these assumptions are unsupported, biasing much of EBP research. The agenda of ‘getting evidence into policy’ has side-lined the empirical description and analysis of how research and policy actually interact in vivo. Rather than asking how research evidence can be made more influential, academics should aim to understand what influences and constitutes policy, and produce more critically and theoretically informed studies of decision-making. We question the main assumptions made by EBP researchers, explore the implications of doing so, and propose new directions for EBP research, and health policy.

The Impact of Food Price Shocks in Uganda: First-Order Versus Long-Run Effects

In developing countries, all too often policies formulated in response to high food prices are inspired by ideology instead of evidence-based policy research. We look at the immediate effects of these shocks faced by households in Uganda on their poverty and well-being. In addition, we look at the economy-wide impact in the long run when all markets have settled at a new equilibrium. We find that in the short run, poverty has increased substantially. However, in the longer run, we find welfare levels of rural farm households in particular to rise sharply, primarily as a result of increased returns to farm labor and agricultural land coupled with improved market prices for output sold. These results call for policies that aim to protect the most vulnerable against high food prices and extreme volatility in the short run, without eliminating the incentives of steadily rising commodity prices for longer-run structural agricultural development.

Lost in translation: overcoming barriers to integrating evidence with practice

A considerable amount of research is produced regarding the critical problems that nations face, yet local, national and international decision makers are not always apt to use the research for evidence-based policy making. The barriers to translating research into practice come from many sources and are often addressed piecemeal in the decision support literature, with little systematic analysis of the connections among them. To build decision infrastructures that are resilient and work seamlessly through the many decision moments of managing complex problems, it is important to have a framework for organising the sequence of those problems. This study presents such a framework and offers real world examples of decision infrastructures that have supported evidence-based decision making throughout the sequence. It draws on a diverse set of barriers identified from policy analysis, organisational management, and technology studies. The purpose of this paper is to give a broad perspective of the common and discovered challenges in relation to each other and to explore how systems thinking, policy informatics, and mature decision infrastructures can help to overcome some of these barriers.

Career Development Research for Evidence-Based Policy

The contribution that the field of career development can make to national policy agenda and formulations on the basis of research are discussed. A precis of how career development can be used to improve students' educational experiences and outcomes, and how they can be used at an institutional level are highlighted.

Reconceptualising Access in Education Policy: Method and Mindset

Enhancing access to education and knowledge is a long-held principle enshrined in education policy. Access to education offers leverage for educational attainment and achievement, at the individual and social levels. In policy, the term equates with concepts of inclusion, social justice and equity. Over the last decades, as education policy has responded to global social, cultural and economic reforms, concepts such as access have also undergone revision. This article revisits the relationship between access, education and knowledge-making, in order to clarify the meaning of access in current education policies by re-evaluating how access is constructed in policy and how the concept associates with other aspects of education. The research examines the concept of access in order to improve the efficacy of policy, opening the way for more systematic and transparent policy analysis and policy making centred on defining and delineating conceptual meanings such as access, as a basis for more targeted policy. Using evidence-based policy research, the article proposes a research process model based on the hierarchy of abstraction, to show that education policy requires systematic examination of key concepts as a fundamental step towards more clearly defined policy postulates that recognise and deal with contextual complexity of education policy. Defining and delineating the meaning of concepts such as access can help in the way that education policy contributes to guiding innovative knowledge construction.

The Sera Lecture 2005 Learning from Each Other: International Perspectives on Research Communities

by language? The answer in any one case will in all probability be some combination of these. In any event it’s a great pleasure to rejoin the Scottish research community, position as head of a small international policy research unit which seeks actively to promote its links with research communities in OECD countries and beyond. The which have generated insights into the challenges that face researchers who seek include a set of reviews of national policies on educational research and development; a series of events focussing on the nature of evidence-based policy research; and a

Evidence and Policy Research

The EERJ roundtable took as its point of departure the experience of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in carrying out policy research. CERI has conducted four reviews of national educational research and development (in New Zealand, England, Mexico and Denmark), and has run a number of meetings specifically on the use of evidence-based policy research (in the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands). Tom Schuller, Head of CERI, presented some conclusions from these and other CERI activities. Responses were made by Wim Jochems, Open University of the Netherlands, Lejf Moos, Danish University of Education, and Agnes van Zanten, Observatoire Sociologique du Changement, CNRS, Paris. The EERJ Roundtable was an opportunity to return to the issues raised in the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2003 Hamburg Roundtable on the ‘OECD Examiners' Report on Educational Research and Development in England’ ( European Educational Research Journal, 3(2), 2004, pp. 510–526) in a wider context and as part of a trend to evaluate the quality and organisation of educational research, and its contribution to educational policy.

Why education matters to anthropology: An interview with Sue Wright

‘Evidence‐based’ methodology has migrated from medical sciences to other disciplines and into policy‐making. An important vector is the US Council for Excellence in Government, which has four ex‐US presidents as honorary cochairs and which targets as principals (members) prestigious individuals who have served as public officials and are now leaders in corporations and NGOs. Through its Coalition for Evidence‐Based Policy, it is working with top federal and state policy makers, arguing that social policies should only be based on this methodology as it reveals ‘what works’ (a phrase echoed by Blair). Education has been a special target, and the Coalition and the US Department of Education cosponsored an OECD meeting on evidence‐based policy research in education in April 2004. It seems US university reform relies more on influencing research methodology than as yet in Europe. This methodology uses statistics and tests which are so large‐scale that they supposedly quash any political agendas harboured by academics. But which political agendas are promoting and prescribing this methodology for academic research into education and social policy? The Danish meaning of pedagogy is the study of the formation of the person in all informal settings as well as in formal education. This differs from the English meaning of pedagogy which emphasizes principles and practice of teaching in formal education.

Opportunities and Challenges of Using Systematic Reviews of Research for Evidence-based Policy in Education

In this paper we discuss the potential for using systematic reviews of research to inform policy in education against the background of severe criticisms of the quality and relevance of individual research studies, most recently by the Commission on the Social Sciences. The potential is set against the reality of conducting systematic reviews of research, following the procedures of the EPPI-Centre. The issues raised and discussed relate to: the specification of the review question, the selection of studies of various designs, the criteria for evaluating research and the identification of implications for users of research in education. The chief obstacles to more effective use of educational research are identified as the different discourses of researchers, practitioners and policy makers; obstacles that only genuinely closer working and mutual understanding of difference priorities, timescales and discourses can address.