Development Project, for example, was reportedly used to justify expanding program innovations. The implementers of the Familias en Accion program, armed with positive results from the IEs, gained support for the continuation and expansion of the program. In IFC, PCRs linked to 3 of 17 IEs explicitly mentioned the demonstration effect of IEs for future investments.7 In particular, the IE of the Life Enrichment Project in India provided estimates of worker welfare in the construction industry and information to support replication.8 • Completed IEs of projects were mentioned in around half of the followon lending operations.9 Around one-third of these citations are marginal, another one-third summarize the effects of the preceding phases, and in the remaining one-third of cases the IE was cited as having some influence on project design. For example, the Mexican Compensatory Education Project was built on the demonstrated success of the Basic Education Development Project; the results of the IE on the El Salvador Basic
Box 5.1
Use of Impact Evaluations to Continue and Expand Programs: Two Cases in Peru
Interviews with local stakeholders revealed that the findings of the IEs (i) contributed to discussions with the Ministry of Finance and informed decisions to continue the project, formulate the third phase—Peru Decentralized Rural Transport Project—and expand it to a national scale; (ii) gave more prominence to the issue of rural roads in the policy agenda and helped legitimize the policy-making process around the project; (iii) helped identify and introduce complementary activities to reinforce the positive impacts of the project (such as electrification, irrigation, communications, promotion of small firms, business plans); (iv) provided evidence of impacts that go beyond the improvement of roads and reduction in travel times (for example, impacts on education, employment patterns, income sources), which facilitated the engagement of other relevant institutions; and (v) helped leverage funding for subsequent IE program activities. The Business Simplification Project was a pilot supported by IFC in Lima and six other municipalities to reduce the time, requirements, and costs related to obtaining a business license in Peru. IFC commissioned the Poverty Action Lab to conduct an IE and contracted a local think tank to do an IE three years after the reform. The first IE found that the intervention had a large and positive effect on formalization rates and access to the formal sector, but the second IE showed that, in the long term, sales, profits, number of employees, access to credit, and investment in infrastructure were not affected by the firm operating with a municipal license. IFC used the findings of the first evaluationa internally and externally to build interest for the intervention. In particular, the program was expanded to other municipalities in Peru and replicated in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. Sources: IEG country case studies. a. This evaluation relied on a before-after approach and was argued to be an IE under the untested assumption that there were no additional factors (such as differential preprogram trends) that could confound the effects of the license simplification process. This methodological limitation, however, did not seem to have affected the use of the report.
Use and Influence of World Bank Group Impact Evaluations
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