What do policymakers look for in a Policy Brief?

Mustapha K. Nabli

Writing Effective Policy Briefs

ERF Training Workshop

September 25-26, 2016

Cairo, Egypt

Who are the policy-makers?• Narrow and limited view: Government, Ministers?

• Deeper: advisors, high level bureaucrats who prepare decisions

• Broader set of policymakers, i.e. those involved in direct policymaking• Parliamentarians

• Relevant members of political parties and their advisers

• Relevant professional organizations: labor unions, business organizations,

• Those who influence policymakers• Civil society organizations

• Media

How do policy-makers get informed?

1. The Media

2. What they hear in debates

3. Output of think tanks

4. Books

5. Papers and Journal articles

Position of policy briefs?

Format of a Policy Brief

ShortoWhy?

oHow short?

Simplicityo language: as easy as possible

ono technical details

AttractiveoPresentation

oNot cluttered with tables/charts/footnotes/references

Substance of a Policy Brief (1) The policy issue

• Sufficiently important and relevant to be worth considering

• Sufficiently specific to be amenable to dealing with and politically promising, i.e; helps policymaker advance his/her agenda

• Not too broad to be considered politically unfeasible or not promising

• Of interest because it helps convince policymaker about some issue of view or reinforce conviction;

Let us review some examples from recent competition

Examples (1)

1. Measures to Protect Poor Sudanese Households from the Risks of Catastrophic Health Expenditures

2. Improving Health Indicators and Reducing Out-of-Pocket Expenditures: The Effective Policy Reforms for the Dramatic Progress in Health System of Turkey

3. Innovation driven arguments to support fertilizer subsidy reform in Egypt

Examples (2)

1. Satisfaction with public services in Qatar: Citizen versus Non-Citizen’s perspective

2. Can the UAE reduce its dependence on oil to 20% by 2021? Or by 2030?

3. Supporting Non-Farm Income in Rural Sudan: An Important Livelihood Strategy for food Security and Poverty Reduction

Examples (3)

1. The Export Subsidy: Causes and Effects

2. To Bank Or Not To Bank: The Impact of Bank Debt and Ownership Concentration on Cash Holdings

3. Financial Liberalization and Investment in developing countries

4. How international migration can advance Moroccan development goals?

5. Going forward in the era of lower oil price in the GCC

6. Does Energy Consumption Spurs Economic Growth in Egypt? Understanding the Causal Linkage

7. Securing Turkey’s Disabled : A Band-Aid for Decreased Standard of Livings

8. Separatist Terrorism and Economic Underdevelopment in Turkey

Substance of a Policy Brief (2) The argument

• Argument has to be sufficiently clear and compelling: can be easily used by policymaker in order to defend position

• Provides as much as possible arguments about why the policy position is better than alternatives

• Few key data and supportive evidence

• Robustness of the analysis should be emphasized

Substance of a Policy Brief (3) The policy message

• Concreteness and specificity/not too broad and generic

• Clarity of the policy prescription

• Takes into consideration implementation issues

Illustration through some examples

Example 1 on Education

What can education systems do to raise performance standards?

• Improving the design of the education systems in MENA.

• Facilitation of learning outside the classroom.

• External incentives to reward school performance.

• External disincentives to focus attention on the demand for learning (reductions in social support in Gulf-States)

• Giving priority to early childhood provision and basic schooling mainly for the poor.

• Effective teaching practices by establishing relations between what is to be learnt and the real-world context.

• Revising the national curricula.

Example 2 on Unemployment

Which effective strategy to reduce youth unemployment?Based on the above analysis, many policy recommendations can be provided including:

• Sound economic policies should be adopted to improve the economic environment in the Arab World. Thus, policies targeting low inflation and high GDP growth needs to be adopted. Fiscal policies to attract foreign direct investment and local savings would be appropriate to create more jobs, particularly in countries with abundant natural resources.

• Public investment should be expanded in projects that provide opportunities for young workers.

• Attractive incentives should be offered to foreign capital aimed at an increase in the production base in SSA countries.

• Demographic policies like health and family planning programmes should be at the top of the development agenda.

• Arab countries need to pay great attention to educational policies. Therefore, serious efforts should be made to improve vocational and technical education with a view of developing skills and experience of youth so as to help them enter the labor markets.

• Finally, given the significant impact of institutional quality on youth unemployment, combating corruption and enhancing the quality of institutions are quite necessary for creating more jobs for youth.

Example 3 on the Oil Curse

Algeria is not immune to the oil curse and it should:

• take into consideration the business climate which has the vital role in the success of the development programs: attraction of the private sector, combat the corruption and sound banking system, are essential to create good competitiveness and reduce unemployment, then achieve the desired development.

• accumulate more of the human capital to enhance the productivity and boost the economic growth.

• apply more industrial policies to achieve economic diversification due to the role of such policies in the performance of the economy.

• increase the quality of the financial institutions to protect the Algerian economy from the recent volatility channel of the oil curse.

• Change the role of the oil fund (FRR) ; that doesn’t necessarily contribute to ensure next generations welfare in the long run, the FRR accumulations are used in the short run to finance the budget deficit and the public investment programs which focus on infrastructure; to a fund for investment instead of income.

Example 4 on Intellectual Property Rights

The Case for Intellectual Property Rights: Should Patents Be Strengthened, Weakened or Abolished Altogether?

November 25, 2015

CIGI Policy Brief No. 70

Joël Blit

This policy brief recommends that to diminish the potential for holdup, uncertainty around patent rights should be reduced. Patents should be easily searchable and more easily understood by non-legal experts. In addition, patents should be narrower and more clearly demarcated. To the extent that the welfare costs of patents appear to outweigh their benefits, the requirements for obtaining a patent should be tightened. Further, patents should be made less broad and, concomitant with the reduction in the length of the product cycle, the length of patents should also be reduced.

Example 5 on Debt

Achieving prudent debt targets using fiscal rulesOECD Policy Note• Prudent debt targets should be set to avoid an overshooting of the debt

thresholds in the case of adverse shocks. Prudent debt targets take into account uncertainties surrounding macroeconomic variables and are thus country-specific. Prudent debt targets are on average 15 percentage points lower than debt threshholds.

• The prudent debt target should serve as the reference point to define numerical fiscal rules. The fiscal rules should have two objectives: promote fiscal discipline and permitting stabilisation policies.

• A combination of a budget balance rule and an expenditure rule seems to suit most countries well. A budget balance target encourages hitting the debt target. And, well-designed expenditure rules appear decisive to ensure the effectiveness of a budget balance rule and can foster long-term growth.