Impact evaluations of the development of human capital and the Colombian system of science, technology and innovation in Colombia

Evaluation plan (CO-L1092) (Only in Spanish)

The first phase of the “Project to Strengthen the National Science, Technology, and Innovation System” in Colombia, approved by the IDB Board of Directors last June, devotes $2 million to the financing of impact evaluations. With these resources and the technical support of the IDB, the Colombian Institute for Scientific and Technological Development (COLCIENCIAS) will carry out impact evaluations in three key areas of intervention: building human capital and promoting research in the sciences; elementary and middle school science education; and innovation by Colombian firms.

In the first area, the IDB project will support impact evaluation of grants for master and doctoral students, young researchers and scientists. Building on the IDB’s previous experiences in this area, the evaluations will focus on both the career achievements and the scientific productivity of the grants’ beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of the COLCIENCIAS grants will be compared with control groups of students, researchers and scientists who applied for the grants but were not selected. The data for the evaluations will be constructed from COLCIENCIAS’s administrative database of curriculum vitae (CV-LAC) and international bibliometric datasets (SCI-Expanded). The effects of these programs will be estimated using quasi-experimental techniques, including regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference.

In the second area, the IDB project will support the evaluation of the ONDAS program, which aims at promoting science among elementary and middle school students. In particular, the program finances the training of teachers on pedagogic approaches based on the development of scientific research projects with children. The evaluation will focus on students’ learning achievements, which will be measured through standardized tests and specific surveys. The evaluation will adopt an experimental design and the training will be randomly assigned to a group of applicant teachers.

In the third area, the IDB project will support the evaluation of programs aimed at promoting innovation in Colombian firms. In this case, COLCIENCIAS will provide grants, matching grants and credit to support the development of specific innovation projects. The evaluation will focus on a set of firm-level outcomes, including innovation intensity (ratio between investment in R&D and sales), interconnectedness with the system of innovation in the country (number of linkages with university and research organizations), innovation outputs (number of new product and new processes) and productivity (labor productivity and total factor productivity).

The data for this evaluation will be mainly constructed on the basis of the National Innovation Survey. This survey will be applied to all the firms that will request COLCIENCIAS’s grants, matching grants and credit, in addition to the sample regularly collected by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE). In this way, the evaluation will be able to compare the COLCIENCIAS’s beneficiaries with a control group of firms that applied but did not receive financial support and an additional control group of firms that did not apply for financial support. The effects of these programs will be estimated using quasi-experimental techniques, including regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference.