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03 August 2018

Perspectives

Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he believes that while economists can contribute to more informed policy discussions and public debates they ought to be cautious in offering advice on policy design.

10 March 2022

Perspectives

There is growing interest in ‘embedded experiments’, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they seem to facilitate speedy translation of research into policy. Discussing a case study from Bihar, Jean Drèze argues that this approach carries a danger of distorting both policy and research.

12 September 2018

Perspectives

Economist-activist Jean Drèze has argued that economists are no better equipped to comment on development policy design than other social science researchers and other stakeholders, and that policymaking requires more than just evidence. In this post, Apurva Bamezai and M.R. Sharan explore the roots of development economists’ centrality in social policy design and locate it in the nature of the evidence they generate and the top-heavy policymaking paradigm in India. Further, focusing on evidence alone, they contend that a more multidisciplinary approach can prove beneficial, and evidence-generation can also be a by-product of increased citizen-State interactions