Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

We review the current body of literature exploring the theories behind holistic human development measurements and the tradeoffs of different methodologies for the construction of human development indices. Through a systematic review of published and grey literature in the fields of human, international, and economic development we identify 22 current indices that aggregate measures from multiple dimensions of human development. We then analyze these indices to identify tradeoffs related to their unique characteristics and construction methodologies, considering ease of calculation, coverage of different measures of human development, ease of interpretation, comparability, and novelty. The report is accompanied by an appendix of summary tables for each index with further details regarding background information, methodology, index components, and evaluation criteria addressed within the report.

This report reviews the current body of peer-reviewed scholarship exploring the impacts of morbidity on economic growth. This overview seeks to provide a concise introduction to the major theories and empirical evidence linking morbidity – and the myriad different measures of morbidity – to economic growth, which is defined primarily in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and related metrics (wages, productivity, etc.). Through a systematic review of published manuscripts in the fields of health economics and economic development we further identify the most commonly-used pathways linking morbidity to economic growth. We also highlight the apparent gaps in the empirical literature (i.e., theorized pathways from morbidity to growth that remain relatively untested in the published empirical literature to date).

This annotated bibliography addresses agricultural transformation and mechanization, dietary diversification and energy needs, and conservation tillage. Each citation is accompanied by an annotation briefly describing the findings and key takeaways. 

Smallholder farmers in Africa are largely located in poor rural areas, are often geographically dispersed, and have limited access to road and communication infrastructure, thus raising the cost of market participation. This is especially true for farmers growing relatively low value staple crops. This literature review summarizes research on the challenges and innovations in linking smallholder producers of staple grains to markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on post-harvest issues including storage, aggregation, and transportation. For each post-harvest stage, we describe challenges faced by farmers and current efforts to address these challenges. In our review, we find a large amount of literature on the constraints to smallholder production and marketing but relatively few examples of innovative or novel technologies designed to improve storage and transportation for rural smallholder producers in Africa. Existing technologies have often been available for some time but have not seen widespread adoption, apparently due to high costs or inadequate funding for on-farm testing and extension. We conclude that the literature is somewhat divided as to whether interventions linking smallholder farmers to markets should be entirely market-driven and focus on linkages that can be profitable without subsidization, or whether NGO- and donor-driven interventions should play a role.