On October 25, 2017, the World Bank Group¡¯s Open Government Global Solutions Group and launched ¡°.¡± The publication is part of the Open Government Impact Research Consortium[1] which is producing a set of reports and tools that will allow government officials and development practitioners to understand the full costs associated with the adoption of open government reforms.
The launch event (a recording of which can be found ) convened specialists from across the World Bank, as well as the broader development community, to discuss a do-it-yourself costing methodology, and brainstorm ways in which this tool can be used to support cost-benefit analyses, and ultimately understand the true value of open government reforms.
Priceless draws on well-established studies in the public health, nutrition, and education sectors to develop a new framework and methodology for costing open government reforms. While governance interventions tend to be less straightforward than those in the health or education sectors in terms of measurable inputs and outputs, such reforms can nonetheless be broken down into various components, including salaries, travel, volunteer labor, and equipment to ultimately arrive at a full economic price tag for the reform program.
The report was based on three case studies: Ukraine¡¯s , Sierra Leone¡¯s , and the Dominican Republic¡¯s . The research team plans to conduct more case studies, either on the same types of reform in different contexts or on other kinds of open government reforms, to further validate the costing framework and determine if the estimates of the original cases are broadly representative, or simply are outliers.
[1] Membership includes, the World Bank Open Government GSG, , , , , , , and the .