Data Innovation for International Development: An overview of natural language processing for qualitative data analysis

Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data, and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP Fragments of Impact project

Infrastructure and Growth in South Africa: Direct and Indirect Productivity Impacts of 19 Infrastructure Measures

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by public sector investment, non-linearities generating the possibility of infrastructure overprovision, simultaneity between infrastructure provision and growth, and the possibility of multiple (hence indirect) channels of influence between infrastructure and productivity improvements. This paper explores these possibilities utilizing panel data for South Africa over the 1970-2000 period, and arrange of 19 infrastructure measures. Utilizing a number of alternative measures of productivity, the prevalence of ambiguous (countervailing signs) results, with little systematic pattern is also shown to hold for our dataset in estimations that include the infrastructure measures in simple growth frameworks. We demonstrate that controlling for potential endogeneity of infrastructure in estimation robustly eliminates virtually all evidence of ambiguous impacts of infrastructure, due for example to possible over investment in infrastructure. Indeed, controlling for the possibility of endogeneity in the infrastructure measures renders the impact of infrastructure capital not only positive, but of economically meaningful magnitudes. These findings are in variant between the direct impact of infrastructure on labour productivity, and the indirect impact of infrastructure on total factor productivity.Growth, productivity, infrastructure, Africa, South Africa

Infrastructure and growth in South Africa : direct and indirect productivity impacts of 19 infrastructure measures

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by public sector investment, non-linearities generating the possibility of infrastructure overprovision, simultaneity between infrastructure provision and growth, and the possibility of multiple (hence indirect) channels of influence between infrastructure and productivity improvements. The authors explore these possibilities using panel data for South Africa over the 1970-2000 period, and a range of 19 infrastructure measures. Using a number of alternative measures of productivity, the prevalence of ambiguous (countervailing signs) results, with little systematic pattern is also shown to hold for their data set in estimations that include the infrastructure measures in simple growth frameworks.The authors demonstrate that controlling for potential endogeneity of infrastructure in estimation robustly eliminates virtually all evidence of ambiguous impacts of infrastructure, due for example to possible overinvestment in infrastructure. Controlling for the possibility of endogeneity in the infrastructure measures renders the impact of infrastructure capital not only positive, but of economically meaningful magnitudes. These findings are invariant between the direct impact of infrastructure on labor productivity, and the indirect impact of infrastructure on total factor productivity.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Growth,Inequality