Care needs to be taken to ensure that incentives faced by researchers do not run counter to the interests of research fenders. If the primary goal is to influence public policy so as to contribute to sustainable economic development, then ideally researchers should face positive incentives which pull them in this direction. They definitely should not face incentives which push them in some other direction. Unfortunately, for many researchers the main incentive is to publish, preferably in class-1 journals, since this clearly enhances professional status. Changes in research prioritisation will have to take into account incentives at researcher level.
There is also the related problem of the evaluation of researchers. The difficulty has to be faced of distinguishing between good research which for some reason did not have the economic impact hoped for and poor research. Moreover, researchers need to feel confident to be able to indicate when a particular line of work is not giving the desired results. This problem of reporting negative research results is important because of the various biases in the system in favour of only reporting positive results, most obviously in the publication of papers. In order to provide the right kind of incentives, clarification is needed concerning the evaluation criteria to be used both for research programmes and for researchers.
The previous sections have suggested some general ways in which the policy relevance of research might be improved. The remainder of the paper considers first some important research problems which seem to face many countries and second the role that research night play in addressing some significant problems.
