An increasing part of the review work we do incorporates economic evaluations. People want to know, not just what works, but what the relative costs and benefits are likely to be when implementing effective interventions, medical or social.
A recent paper published by Rob Anderson, from Exeter University, looks at how useful systematic reviews of economic evaluations are in the context of health care. He argues that synthesising results across lots of different economic evaluations is risky for three reasons: (1) economic data is very context dependent, so it’s dangerous to generalise across settings; (2) assuming results can be generalised is crucial if the findings are going to inform policy decisions; and (3) decision analytic modelling, one of the main techniques economists use, is itself a synthesis tool, so doing additional systematic reviewing may be redundant.
The paper does not claim synthesising economic data is not useful or informative; it’s just that there may be more effective ways of doing it than systematic reviews.