Hey Jeroen! I’m a researcher at ACE and have been doing some work on our country prioritization model. This is a helpful question and one that we’ve been thinking about ourselves.
The general argument is that strong economic performance tends to correlate with liberalism, democracy, and progressive values, which themselves seem to correlate with progressive attitudes towards, and legislation for, animals. This is why it’s included in Mercy For Animals’ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI), which we previously used for our evaluations and which our current country prioritization model is still loosely based on.
The relevance of this factor depends on the type of intervention being used—e.g., economic performance is likely to be particularly relevant for programs that depend on securing large amounts of government funding. For a lot of programs it won’t be very relevant, and for some a similar but more relevant indicator of tractability could be the percentage of income not spent on food (which we also use), as countries are probably more likely to allocate resources to animal advocacy if their money and mental bandwidth aren’t spent on securing essential needs. (Because of these kinds of considerations, this year we took a more bespoke approach when considering the likely tractability of each charity’s work, relying less on the quantitative outputs of the country prioritization framework.)
Your intuition about money going further in poorer countries (everything else being equal) makes sense. We seek to capture this where possible on a charity-by-charity basis in our Cost-Effectiveness Assessments. For country prioritization more broadly, in theory it’s possible to account for this using indices like the OECD’s Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) Index. Various issues have been raised with the validity of PPP measurements (some examples here), which is one of the reasons we haven’t included it to date in our prioritization model, but for next year we plan to explore those issues in more detail and what the trade-offs are.
Hey Jeroen! I’m a researcher at ACE and have been doing some work on our country prioritization model. This is a helpful question and one that we’ve been thinking about ourselves.
The general argument is that strong economic performance tends to correlate with liberalism, democracy, and progressive values, which themselves seem to correlate with progressive attitudes towards, and legislation for, animals. This is why it’s included in Mercy For Animals’ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI), which we previously used for our evaluations and which our current country prioritization model is still loosely based on.
The relevance of this factor depends on the type of intervention being used—e.g., economic performance is likely to be particularly relevant for programs that depend on securing large amounts of government funding. For a lot of programs it won’t be very relevant, and for some a similar but more relevant indicator of tractability could be the percentage of income not spent on food (which we also use), as countries are probably more likely to allocate resources to animal advocacy if their money and mental bandwidth aren’t spent on securing essential needs. (Because of these kinds of considerations, this year we took a more bespoke approach when considering the likely tractability of each charity’s work, relying less on the quantitative outputs of the country prioritization framework.)
Your intuition about money going further in poorer countries (everything else being equal) makes sense. We seek to capture this where possible on a charity-by-charity basis in our Cost-Effectiveness Assessments. For country prioritization more broadly, in theory it’s possible to account for this using indices like the OECD’s Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) Index. Various issues have been raised with the validity of PPP measurements (some examples here), which is one of the reasons we haven’t included it to date in our prioritization model, but for next year we plan to explore those issues in more detail and what the trade-offs are.
Hope that helps!
Thank you so much for this elaborate and insightful response, Max! I understand the argument much better now.