Development Economics

Impact Evaluation

This guide helps you get your bearings in Impact Evaluation before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.

Before You Dive In

Impact Evaluation asks why some societies grow and reduce poverty faster than others, and which interventions work.
Rough timeline: big-push and structuralist theories -> market-oriented reforms -> institutions and governance turn -> RCT and micro-policy evidence era.
Start with institutions, human capital, and state capacity as interacting constraints rather than isolated variables.
In Noosaga, compare frameworks by level: household behavior, market failures, political institutions, or global structure.

Poverty trapSelf-reinforcing constraints that keep households or regions at low-income equilibria.

Randomized controlled trialExperimental method for estimating causal effects of interventions.

State capacityAbility of public institutions to implement policy and enforce rules effectively.

Structural transformationShift of labor and output from low-productivity sectors to higher-productivity sectors.

External validityWhether evidence from one context transfers to another context.

Treating successful pilots as guaranteed scalable solutions.

Assuming micro interventions can substitute for macro institutional reform.

Confusing short-run measured outcomes with long-run development trajectories.

Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?

Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.

See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.

Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.