FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling.
FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world.
FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.
Using Mixed Methods to Improve the Quality and Relevance of Impact Evaluation
Image
It is now widely recognized that a rigorous, policy-relevant impact evaluation embeds the counterfactual analysis of impact in a wider analysis of the underlying program theory (theory of change) of the intervention, also referred to as causal chain analysis. Unpacking the causal chain requires a combination of factual and counterfactual analysis. The seminar will present examples of causal chains. The types of data collection and analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – to analyze the different links in the chain will be discussed. A major challenge in mixed methods is to truly integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches.
About the speaker
Howard White formerly led the impact evaluation program of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, where he was responsible for impact studies on basic education in Ghana, health and nutrition in Bangladesh, rural electrification, rural development in Andhra Pradesh and a review of impact studies of water supply and sanitation.
Philippines Conference Room
Howard White
Executive Director
Speaker
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ieimpact.org)
Seminars
"Across the Pacific" Curriculum Project
| Image
|
| Student-aged children in th |
REAP directors preside over Impact Evaluation workshop for Chinese officials
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
REAP directors Scott Rozelle and Linxiu Zhang presided as head trainers in a Shanghai-based Impact Evaluation workshop on October 16 and 17. During an intensive two day workshop Rozelle and Zhang taught and interacted with more than 100 ministers, high-ranking officials and policy analysts from China, South and Southeast Asia and Central Asia.
Sponsored in part by 3ie, an international organization dedicated to improving Impact Evaluation Practices, and the Asian Development Bank, the workshop has been run by SHIPDET and China's Ministry of Finance for the past several years. The Chinese government is committed to promoting development evaluation capacity building in China and across Asia through workshops such as this one. China's Vice-Minister of Finance has stated: "Performance evaluation will definitely become an important concept in China's economic development." REAP's participation in this year's Impact Evaluation workshop is an important step forward in this process.
Broken into two parts, in the first part of the workshop Rozelle lectured on the increasing importance of Impact Evaluation in good governance internationally and Zhang presented a talk on Impact Evaluation in China. The second part of the workshop was organized around a practioner's workshop. Participants developed Impact Evaluation proposals and discussed strategies for integrating Evaluation into their development programs.
Hero Image
All News button
1
New Evidence on the Impact of China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme and its Implications for Rural Primary Healthcare: Multivariate Difference-in-difference Analysis
Paragraphs
Objectives: To determine whether China's New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), which aims to provide health insurance to 800 million rural citizens and to correct distortions in rural primary care, and the individual policy attributes have affected the operation and use of village health clinics.
Design: We performed a difference-in-difference analysis using multivariate linear regressions, controlling for clinic and individual attributes as well as village and year effects.
Setting: 100 villages within 25 rural counties across five Chinese provinces in 2004 and 2007.
Participants: 160 village primary care clinics and 8339 individuals.
Main outcome measures: Clinic outcomes were log average weekly patient flow, log average monthly gross income, log total annual net income, and the proportion of monthly gross income from medicine sales. Individual outcomes were probability of seeking medical care, log annual "out of pocket" health expenditure, and two measures of exposure to financial risk (probability of incurring out of pocket health expenditure above the 90th percentile of spending among the uninsured and probability of financing medical care by borrowing or selling assets).
Results: For village clinics, we found that NCMS was associated with a 26% increase in weekly patient flow and a 29% increase in monthly gross income, but no change in annual net revenue or the proportion of monthly income from drug revenue. For individuals, participation in NCMS was associated with a 5% increase in village clinic use, but no change in overall medical care use. Also, out of pocket medical spending fell by 19% and the two measures of exposure to financial risk declined by 24-63%. These changes occurred across heterogeneous county programmes, even in those with minimal benefit packages.
Conclusions: NCMS provides some financial risk protection for individuals in rural China and has partly corrected distortions in Chinese rural healthcare (reducing the oversupply of specialty services and prescription drugs). However, the scheme may have also shifted uncompensated new responsibilities to village clinics. Given renewed interest among Chinese policy makers in strengthening primary care, the effect of NCMS deserves greater attention.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
BMJ
External URL
Understanding the Expansion and Quality of Engineering Education in India
-
The Indian economy has expanded at a fairly steady and rapid rate in the past fifteen years, and part of that expansion has been a greatly increased demand for university graduates, particularly for those in technical fields. As of 2008, India was the largest producer and exporter of IT enabled services in the developing world. At the same time, Indian higher education has also expanded rapidly, both in the number of students enrolled and number of institutions—now four times the number in the US and Europe and more than twice that of China. The growth of private colleges in technical and business fields is an important feature of India’s higher education expansion, but it needs to be interpreted carefully. The rapid expansion of unaided colleges affiliated with universities is gradually transforming the role of public universities into regulating, degree-granting institutions and away from teaching or research (Kapur, 2009). Further, the form that higher education expansion took in India in the 2000s resulted in a steady reduction in public spending per student in higher education in the early 2000s.
State authorities appear increasingly willing to grant support for private unaided colleges to become autonomous universities, thereby loosening the regulatory power over the institutions’ decision making. At the same time, many signals (including the government’s 2012 higher education enrollment target of 15 percent of age cohort—approximately 21 million students) point toward considerable expansion of public universities and colleges over the next 4-5 years. The total number of students in all these institutions together, however, will be small compared to the total output of India’s technical colleges.
Given this background and some preliminary data we have from student and institutional surveys and interviews in Indian technical colleges and universities, we try to address several important issues in Indian higher education:
- What is the essence of the higher education financing system established by government policies and what can we infer from that financing system about government goals for higher education in the next ten years?
- How are colleges, their faculty, and their students reacting to these policies?
- What can be said about the current quality of Indian technical/engineering education and its prospects for the future?
- What can we conclude from the Indian case about the driving forces shaping higher education and where they are likely to take it?
Philippines Conference Room
Martin Carnoy
Vida Jacks Professor of Education
Speaker
Stanford University School of Education
Seminars
“International Workshop on Evaluation With Participation (EWP)” held in Beijing
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
An "International Workshop on Evaluation With Participation (EWP)" was held in Beijing between August 21st and 23rd. This is one of the series of activities organized by the Rural Education Action Project (REAP) in order to share its projects and research progress with the general public.
The Policy Forum on Rural Education Challenges in China was held on the first day (August 21st). Professor Jikun Huang, the Director of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Jin He, the Ford Foundation's Program Officer, gave the opening address. Dr. Linxiu Zhang, Deputy Director of CCAP and Director of REAP-China, chaired the opening ceremony. During the day, REAP team members and collaborators shared their most recent research findings on multiple topics: nutrition and education in rural areas, rural boarding school management, barriers to higher education for the rural poor, and the migrant children's education . Experts from other organizations were also invited to share the results from their research.
From August 22nd to 23rd, Paul Glewwe, a professor from the University of Minnesota, gave a two-day intensive training on the "Methods for Project Evaluation." At Glewwe's side was Professor Scott Rozelle, the Co-Director of REAP from Stanford University, who summarized the presentation with his fluent Chinese and translated on the spot.
Nearly 140 participants from government organizations, universities, research organizations, NGOs, businesses, and the media, attended the policy forum and the methodology training. The participants all agreed that the training was very helpful. They also expressed their keen interest in building up their research capacities through similar training workshops in the future.
Hero Image
All News button
1
Program Evaluation Training
A REAP-sponsored workshop lead by REAP affiliate Paul Gewwe (University of Minnesota) designed to target foundation and non-profit managers and executives, researchers and government officials.
Introduction and objectives
Numerous programs are implemented by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are intended to change individuals’ economic or social outcomes. Common examples of this include agricultural extension services, public health programs and education programs. An important (and admittedly difficult to answer) question is: How effective are these programs in changing economic or social outcomes? Comparing the relative effectiveness of different programs, as well as comparing these programs’ benefits to their costs is crucial for governments to understand.
Objectives
- To obtain a better understanding of how to objectively assess the impacts of programs through program design and data analysis
- To specifically discuss possible scenarios based on how intervention status is decided, and methods for analyzing data for each scenario
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research
No.11 Jia Datun Road
Chaoyang District
Beijing, China
Paul Gewwe
Speaker
University of Minnesota
Workshops
Children’s Social Welfare in China, 1989–1997: Access to Health Insurance and Education
Paragraphs
Fundamental changes in China’s finance system for social services have decentralized responsibilities for provision to lower levels of government and increased costs to individuals. The more localized, market-oriented approaches to social service provision, together with rising economic inequalities, raise questions about access to social services among China’s children. With a multivariate analysis of three waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1989, 1993 and 1997), this article investigates two dimensions of children’s social welfare: health care, operationalized as access to health insurance, and education, operationalized as enrolment in and progress through school. Three main results emerge. First, analyses do not suggest an across-the-board decline in access to these child welfare services during the period under consideration. Overall, insurance rates, enrolment rates and gradefor- age attainment improved. Secondly, while results underscore the considerable disadvantages in insurance and education experienced by poorer children in each wave of the survey, there is no evidence that household socio-economic disparities systematically widened. Finally, findings suggest that community resources conditioned the provision of social services, and that dimensions of community level of development and capacity to finance public welfare increasingly mattered for some social services.
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Access to Health Insurance and Education