Identify Policy Reports - First Pass

[tmadon]

1) Ask WB library for text version of Policy Reports database (Temina)
2) ALL: Play with keyword searches on existing online databases (e.g. World Bank, dec.usaid.gov, etc). Identify the web-based data available for policy reports, i.e. what information we'd want to pull into a table (e.g. authors, agency, date, ISBN, references/citations, etc). Share your results by adding to Google Sheets, but "checkpoint" by exporting to CSV and uploading to Git.
3) Poke around http://aiddata.org for budget data. (note: OECD DB only has CRS codes, while Aiddata has richer project data)

[renai33]

Temina wrote: Also, here is a tree (browsable menu) of World Bank reports. We should select a few classes of reports to search for citations to the academic literature: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/community-list Here is another listing of World Bank books http://elibrary.worldbank.org/page/wb-books

[renai33]

From my experience in government aid agency/ int'l org as well as from my reading of the WB documents, academic research hardly influence project-level management decision directly (project documents- project docs do not cite) . So I think it's more feasible to identify paths of influence. I think that the plausible paths from research to policy would be as follows. The cycle also corresponds to the policy/project cycle fot eh int'l agencies.

Academic research -> Policy-oriented research within the WB (e.g. annual World Dev Report) --> Policy and Strategy documents (e.g. economic and sector work studies) / Planning and budget documents -> Project Management Guidelines and Tools (e.g., Toolkit Exante BFL model) --> [Project management documents] --> Evaluation reports (e.g. WB the Philippine CCT impact eval)

We should focus on the direct citation of research in the first place but may not be very successful to finding many examples. Then later on, we would have to trace both direct and indirect influence of research by first looking at macro policy reports where academic studies are cited and then trace micro-level documents which cite the policy reports containing academic research.

[YangZhou0417]

Thanks for Woojin the information providing the information and I found a presentation PPT involving Exante Model here, which might be useful: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPSIA/Resources/490023-1171551075650/050510_ExAnteCashTransferToolkit.pdf

[tmadon]

WB contacts suggest that we work with someone in World Bank Operations to understand which project documents are most relevant for our search. We want to understand where the $$$ gets invested -- so we'll need to understand the Bank's file structure. This sort of "real world" validation is important, as noted in this publication: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1005694202977