Interdisciplinary Program Office (IPO) Sustainability Seminar Series - The Promises and Challenges of Development Data for Policy Decisions

I begin by broadly discussing the growing variety of data sources available to researchers and decision-makers working on development priorities such as reducing poverty or inequality. I offer a framework for evaluating trade offs across data sources, and some findings from a case study that illustrates while novel data provide some relatively cost-effective insights, they are still limited for studying demographic sub-populations such as small-scale producers and women, important to development and the Sustainable Development Goals. Accordingly, I spend the remainder of the time examining some of the data production decisions made by the World Bank and others on data production - instrument inconsistencies, question choices, sampling – and the data curation decisions made by analysts – cleaning, merging and managing – that can affect estimates, outcomes and ultimately decision-making.