Alliance for Useful Evidence

How Evidence can help the UK's economic growth

07.12.2012

In this guest blog Professor Jonathan Shepherd writes on how increasing public and third sector investment in crime and justice and education research will increase economic growth.

The importance of evidence is usually considered in the context of increasing effectiveness and reducing costs; getting more for less by investing in interventions and programmes which are more effective and more cost effective than alternative interventions and programmes.

But evidence production also has important contributions to make to economic growth, as the report, "Medical Research: What's it worth?" demonstrates. This study, commissioned by the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust under the auspices of the UK Evaluation Forum, concluded that the health and GDP gains from public and third sector investment in cardiovascular and mental health research over the period 1975-92 are equivalent to an annual rate of return of 39% and 37% respectively. In other words, a £1 public and third sector investment in research in cardiovascular disease produced a stream of benefits equivalent to earning £0.39 per year in perpetuity. This economic benefit comprises the annual value of new treatment and preventive interventions (9%) and an annual rate of return of 30% in GDP gains: increases in UK national output, productivity and income.

Research investment by one organisation in this context has benefits far beyond those accruing to that particular organisation. This explains the GDP gains. These wider benefits (spillovers - a key objective in public research spending) are transmitted, for example, by skilled graduates and come from ideas generated by universities close to which high tech firms locate themselves to capitalise on these; from increased capacity to exploit existing evidence; from entrepreneurial opportunities; and from international trade.

The relationship between publically funded research and pharmaceutical industry investment was also studied in a UK context; every £1 of public/third sector investment resulted in £2.20-£5.10 additional pharmaceutical company investment, earning an extra £1.10-£2.50 per year for the UK economy.

This perspective is of course from research in one area, healthcare, where arrangements for evidence production, synthesis, guideline publication and evidence implementation are far more developed than they are in, say, as crime and justice and education. Here, there are few or no practitioner scientists akin to professors of medicine or general practice, and few dedicated research funding schemes. The Education Endowment Foundation provides a model which should be applied more widely; when will we see a probation endowment fund? Research and services are not integrated in a way likely to attract private sector research partners or to produce spillover benefits. There is therefore great potential, for growth as well as for service outcomes, in putting these things right.

Consider the rehabilitation of offenders and policing. Investment in at least some research centres for these sectors, co-led by practitioners and researchers in research intensive universities with close links with probation and police services, would provide many opportunities for private sector partners to co-develop new technological and behavioural solutions to reoffending, crime and disorder in the same way that medical schools forge health and GDP enhancing partnerships with pharmaceutical and other health industries.

Al Blumstein, the distinguished criminologist, once ruefully observed that investment in crime research doesn't come close to investment in dental research. Both sectors depend on behavioural as well as technical solutions. The explanation is that dental research and services are integrated in well funded dental schools in research intensive universities which are magnets for the dental technology industry whereas criminology research is led and largely carried out far from front line offender rehabilitation and policing and far from practitioner training.

In the same way, integration of education research with primary, secondary and further education, capitalising on the Education Secretary's promotion of "teaching hospital" arrangements for teacher training (see article 'Michael Gove sets tough new targets for secondary schools') would attract learning technology companies and result in new technologies, better outcomes and a virtuous circle of innovation and spillover benefits.  In this context, it's a tragedy that teachers stop practicing in school classrooms when they become education academics; such an arrangement is a barrier to both progress and growth.

Public and third sector investment in evidence generation for, and with all public services, rather than as at present, only a few, would increase economic growth, including by attracting high tech firms to local centres of evidence generation and application excellence. This is an important innovation for national prosperity.



Professor Jonathan Shepherd CBE FMedSci is a practicing surgeon and directs Cardiff University's Violence Research Group. In 2008 he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. He is a member of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, and a leading figure in advancing the evidence agenda in the UK.

(The views in this blog are the author's own and not necessarily those of the Alliance for Useful Evidence)