Interesting list! I had a quick look at the papers for three areas not covered by major EA funders: my thoughts below
e-Government procurement—IT systems to manage government tenders/purchases—making it easy for private sector companies to sell to governments, reducing prices through increased competition and reducing opportunities for corruption.
Looks very attractive because of a high benefit to cost ratio and relatively tractable problem,
benefit-to-cost ratio could be as low as 8 for small, low income countries like Liberia and over 300 for a mid size, lower middle income country—a pretty wide range!
The paper estimates that in the long-term implementing across half of all government procurement saves an average of 6.75% on prices paid by government for goods and services, providing some evidence from real world programs.
Their estimated implementation costs look very low for complex projects (but on the other hand they also don’t estimate costs of manual processes replaced, which might balance out somewhat)
The problem isn’t as tractable as it first looks because you have to convince (many levels of) the governments to change their ways. Theoretical ways to tackle:
advocacy promoting move to e-procurement
but IT firms capable of delivering already commercially incentivised to do this
and governments with pervasive corruption incentivised to ignore!
fund development of “best practice” IT procurement solutions
but in practice the IT solution isn’t the hard or expensive bit; it’s the integrating with local laws and language, and getting govt departments to adopt it
capacity building and upfront funding for bodies trying to deliver.
if you believe the paper’s numbers, could be funded for as little as $22m over 12 years (and may even repayable in later years based on KPIs)
Not a traditional EA opp, but paying a government to implement an IT system to save themselves money is the sort of thing that’s so counterintuitive maybe only an EA org would consider it!
The financial side stacks up on paper, but the net impact in terms of things EAs care about like utility is less obvious. Reduced government procurement costs can allow them to do more for less, but it also means local firms earning less. Not all cost savings will be due to corruption and not all of the money saved will be spent well.
Land tenure security—creating a registry of land ownership—making it easier for new landowners to sell or borrow against the value of their land, and enabling for them to spend money improving it without the risk of being dispossessed.
The actual mechanisms by which householders and farmers benefit varies between studies and countries, with some finding no effect
The benefits take some time to accrue (the paper assumes typically 6 to have any effect and estimates the NPV of benefits over 30 years) and meta analysis suggests timing may explain some of the “no effect” results
EA organisations could promote the idea, or even subsidise it, but any actual action is contingent on government action
This idea is well known to development economists and has been heavily promoted by de Soto (I’m amazed the paper didn’t namecheck or cite him) in Peru and various other places, so I’m not sure how much EA advocacy would add.
Organisations like the World Bank have supported land registration projects financially and there is some scope for a privately-funded NGO like De Soto’s ILD to actually do the hard work of identifying informal landownerss with the local government’s blessing
The paper assumes a surprisingly high cost per site to maintain the land registry, so it’s not a one-time intervention
Trade—reducing tariffs and trade barriers
Free(r) trade can only be implemented by national governments. The cost/benefit analysis is looking at the costs to negatively affected industries vs the benefits to everyone else across multiples countries, so it’s not comparable to GiveWell’s estimates
The idea has been promoted/debated by economists since the 1700s and is promoted by multilateral bodies like the WTO/World Bank/IMF, so it’s not really clear what EA advocacy would add.
Interesting list! I had a quick look at the papers for three areas not covered by major EA funders: my thoughts below
e-Government procurement—IT systems to manage government tenders/purchases—making it easy for private sector companies to sell to governments, reducing prices through increased competition and reducing opportunities for corruption.
Looks very attractive because of a high benefit to cost ratio and relatively tractable problem,
benefit-to-cost ratio could be as low as 8 for small, low income countries like Liberia and over 300 for a mid size, lower middle income country—a pretty wide range!
The paper estimates that in the long-term implementing across half of all government procurement saves an average of 6.75% on prices paid by government for goods and services, providing some evidence from real world programs.
Their estimated implementation costs look very low for complex projects (but on the other hand they also don’t estimate costs of manual processes replaced, which might balance out somewhat)
The problem isn’t as tractable as it first looks because you have to convince (many levels of) the governments to change their ways. Theoretical ways to tackle:
advocacy promoting move to e-procurement
but IT firms capable of delivering already commercially incentivised to do this
and governments with pervasive corruption incentivised to ignore!
fund development of “best practice” IT procurement solutions
but in practice the IT solution isn’t the hard or expensive bit; it’s the integrating with local laws and language, and getting govt departments to adopt it
capacity building and upfront funding for bodies trying to deliver.
if you believe the paper’s numbers, could be funded for as little as $22m over 12 years (and may even repayable in later years based on KPIs)
Not a traditional EA opp, but paying a government to implement an IT system to save themselves money is the sort of thing that’s so counterintuitive maybe only an EA org would consider it!
The financial side stacks up on paper, but the net impact in terms of things EAs care about like utility is less obvious. Reduced government procurement costs can allow them to do more for less, but it also means local firms earning less. Not all cost savings will be due to corruption and not all of the money saved will be spent well.
Land tenure security—creating a registry of land ownership—making it easier for new landowners to sell or borrow against the value of their land, and enabling for them to spend money improving it without the risk of being dispossessed.
The actual mechanisms by which householders and farmers benefit varies between studies and countries, with some finding no effect
The benefits take some time to accrue (the paper assumes typically 6 to have any effect and estimates the NPV of benefits over 30 years) and meta analysis suggests timing may explain some of the “no effect” results
EA organisations could promote the idea, or even subsidise it, but any actual action is contingent on government action
This idea is well known to development economists and has been heavily promoted by de Soto (I’m amazed the paper didn’t namecheck or cite him) in Peru and various other places, so I’m not sure how much EA advocacy would add.
Organisations like the World Bank have supported land registration projects financially and there is some scope for a privately-funded NGO like De Soto’s ILD to actually do the hard work of identifying informal landownerss with the local government’s blessing
The paper assumes a surprisingly high cost per site to maintain the land registry, so it’s not a one-time intervention
Trade—reducing tariffs and trade barriers
Free(r) trade can only be implemented by national governments. The cost/benefit analysis is looking at the costs to negatively affected industries vs the benefits to everyone else across multiples countries, so it’s not comparable to GiveWell’s estimates
The idea has been promoted/debated by economists since the 1700s and is promoted by multilateral bodies like the WTO/World Bank/IMF, so it’s not really clear what EA advocacy would add.
Thanks for the investigation, David! Strongly upvoted. It does look like the benefit-to-cost ratios are overestimates.