Thesis: The Model and Methodology

The method behind this thesis is actually a rather simple statistical model with a lot of data. For those interested in how I'm going to be calculating what types of project have the most significant impact, read on:

The original focus of my thesis was World Bank funding of projects in the CIS. Different types of projects yield different results, and there hasn't been a consistent way of measuring what types of projects have better impacts that I've seen in academia. Thus the statistical proposal is this:


There are approximately 600 World Bank projects listed on their project database (available online) for the CIS. I will take each project and give it it's own row in SPSS with the following information:
1. Name of Project
2. Date Project Proposed
3. Date Project Approved
4. Date Project Started
5. Date Project Completed
6. Funding Source
7. Country
8. External funding? (Dollar amount)

Then measures at (1) project start (2) project completion (3) 3 years after completion (4) 5 years after completion and (5) 10 years after completion for the following development measures: GDP,GNP, Per Capita Income, Human Development Index, GINI, Freedom House, Literacy Rate, and Life expectancy.

Hopefully with this amount of data trends will start emerging. Educational funding should impact literacy rates, but will roads also help them? Time lagging and SPSS should be able to try to find some sort of relationship with the numbers. As mentioned in previous posts, there's been mixed evidence on the impacts of transportation infrastructure funding.

If there is some trends that come out of this, there may be an argument to do a similar study for some private sector firms to see the differences if they exist.