Economics: What is measured can be improved

MEXICO - Report 19 Aug 2019 by Mauricio Gonzalez and Francisco González

Last week we took up the results of Inegi’s most recent National Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the accompanying analysis by Coneval of how the varying forms of poverty are evolving, including evidence of significant setbacks recorded by some multidimensional poverty indicators that had been improving for years. This week we turn our focus directly on Coneval itself, and how the crucial role it plays in creating the possibility of evidence-based policy design and implementation appears to be under threat. That risk was underscored after the institution’s highly respected founder and executive director was stripped of his post just four days after publishing an article in which he raised concerns about the implications of failing to take into account the specificities and needs of the different federal public administrative institutions.

The council continues to face limitations in the extent of coverage it can provide for assessing social programs at the state and municipal levels, as well as in better mechanisms for determining the extent to which its recommendations are followed, a gap filled more recently by the Evaluation Monitoring System the council has jointly introduced with a unit of the Finance Ministry. Nevertheless, Coneval information has increasingly influenced decision-making.

Through its mechanism for detecting aspects subject to improvement it has been possible to enter into covenants with the agency or ministry evaluated and spell out the actions to be implemented to address some of the recommendations arising out of the evaluation process. Through June 2019 Coneval reports that it has detected 6,764 uses given to Coneval-generated information for the purpose of improving social development policy.

Such tools allow not only for fiscal oversight, but also for learning just what aspects of government interventions might be working or failing to deliver the desired results. It is valuable for defining budgetary allocations on the basis of a greater wealth of information, as well as for rooting out any efforts to deploy federal funds for partisan clientelist purposes. But the survival of this entire burgeoning system, which has been more than two decades in the making, is now under threat.

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