Up and down the Zoning Scale

Zoning in this country has traditionally been a waiting game with the development proceess. Not knowing what specific property will be used for and not controlling the ball game suficiently to say what will be the use, land has been zoned in a “wait and see” classification. Some land has been overzoned for certain uses; other land has been left fairly open as to its potential use. Thus the system itself necessitates constant change in a property's classification as circumstances change. Many of these changes are made to accommodate a specific development proposal, so they are to the landowner's benefit. However, other rezonings result in a reduction in the landowner's potential for profit. It is this type of change—downzoning—that is the subject of this discussion.     

Replication Studies of Development Impact Evaluations

Six years ago, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) launched a programme to promote and fund replication studies of impact evaluations in international development. We designed the programme with the objective of improving the quality of evidence for development policy-making, using replication research to both validate the results of published impact evaluations and build the incentives for more transparent and high quality research going forward. The programme’s focus is internal replication, which uses the original data from a study to address the same question as that study. This Journal of Development Studies special issue compiles the majority of completed 3ie-funded replication studies initiated in the first years of the programme. In all cases the pure replication components of these studies are generally able to reproduce the results published in the original article. Most of the measurement and estimation analyses confirm the robustness of the original articles or call into question just a subset of the original findings. These replication studies mostly focus on providing additional information about the impacts of the interventions – especially additional information that can be important for interpreting the articles for the purpose of policy-making.