Speakers

Prof Luis   Crouch
Consultant, Global Partnership for Education

Biography:

Dr Luis Crouch is a consultant to the Global Partnership for Education on the improvement of data use in the education sector (for whom he is currently drafting an options paper for improving data in the sector), as well as a participant in UNESCO’s Global Alliance for Measurement of Learning (GAML). He has worked in all fields of education data, from field surveys and learning outcomes assessments, to the analysis of said data, to simulation and planning models for the education sector. He is also experienced in the presentation of such analysis to high-level decision-makers at Cabinet level. He has similar experience in other sectors including health and demography as well as agriculture.  He is the author of many scientific papers and technical reports to Ministries, as well has having edited and written chapters in many books.

"Trends education data needed for the Sustainable Development Goals and econometric assessment of the value of having the needed data"

Much has been said about the cost of producing information for tracking the global United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The expense figures can be daunting. Little has been written about how to estimate the worth of such information. Here we say that a good upper bound on the value of information is to ask how much more profitable an enterprise using best available information would be, compared to one that did not. The paper uses the Sustainable Development Goals as case. It then takes one sector, education, and examines the degree to which a typical country (loosely based on Uganda) is “under producing,” in terms of the social profitability of the sector. The model uses a mathematical optimization approach to calculate the economic worth of trained labor minus the cost of training it and comparing the “good” information scenario against standard practice. According to the results a country could be up to 14 percentage points more productive using best information. Caveats include the difficulty of analytically distinguishing a country that does not have good information from one that has it but is politically constrained from using it; the estimates on the value of information can only be considered an upper bound.