  Over the last 30 years, the concept of policy coherence for development has
received especial attention among academics, practitioners and international
organizations. However, its quantification and measurement remain elusive. To
address this challenge, we develop a theoretical and empirical framework to
measure the coherence of policy priorities for development. Our procedure takes
into account the country-specific constraints that governments face when trying
to reach specific development goals. Hence, we put forward a new definition of
policy coherence where context-specific efficient resource allocations are
employed as the baseline to construct an index. To demonstrate the usefulness
and validity of our index, we analyze the cases of Mexico, Korea and Estonia,
three developing countries that, arguably, joined the OECD with the aim of
coherently establishing policies that could enable a catch-up process. We find
that Korea shows significant signs of policy coherence, Estonia seems to be in
the process of achieving it, and Mexico has unequivocally failed. Furthermore,
our results highlight the limitations of assessing coherence in terms of naive
benchmark comparisons using development-indicator data. Altogether, our
framework sheds new light in a promising direction to develop bespoke analytic
tools to meet the 2030 agenda.
