Methodology
Whereas previous studies on government spending and investment generally considered only one type of investment, IFPRI is attempting to capture the synergies and dynamics among investments by assessing the impacts of many different public investments at once. This approach allows researchers to rank the returns of various public investments; identify the channels through which investments affect growth, inequality, and poverty in long run; and calculate how many poor people are raised above the poverty line by additional units of spending on various items. These kinds of results offer policy insights that are extremely useful in making government strategies to alleviate poverty more effective.