Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are justified on efficiency grounds, the contract that optimally balances demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds, features a minimum revenue guarantee and a...

A methodology to describe the distributional and behavioural effects of child care subsidies is presented within a micro simulation framework. We discuss the effects of changing the governmental policy to support families with preschool children, from today's subsidisation of spaces at child...

In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue "Rural aspirations—Livelihood decisions and rural development trajectories", we outline current views on aspirations and their relevance for development research, projects and approaches. Using several examples from Africa, we outline how the...

In the past decades the involvement of local experts in the planning and evaluation of development programs has steadily increased. Ownership of development planning is propagated as major aim of bilateral and international development co-operation. Yet, the quality and performance of many local...

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian countries have been faced with numerous development challenges in agriculture, especially those related to water use. Well-intentioned foreign donors and development agencies have stepped in to support local farmers, research...

We present a new micro-based approach to evaluate the effect of water- and health-related development projects. We collect information from 1.8 million individuals from DHS clusters (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 38 developing economies between 1986 and 2017. By geocodes, we combine cluster...

This paper investigates the impact of improved water provision on individual health outcomes in rural Uganda. We merge household and individual panel datasets with sub-county level administrative data on water supply projects. Our approach allows us to estimate fixed-effect panel data models...

In 2006 the Center for Global Development's report 'When Will We Ever Learn? Improving lives through impact evaluation' bemoaned the lack of rigorous impact evaluations. The authors of the present paper researched international organizations and countries including Mexico, Colombia, South...