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Category: Development

Published September 7, 2011

Corruption in Developing Countries

That is the title of a new working paper by Ben Olken and Rohini Pande:

“Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists’ ability to measure corruption. This, in turn, has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption. We find robust evidence that corruption responds to standard economic incentive theory, but also that effects of anti-corruption policies often attenuate as officials find alternate strategies to pursue rents.”

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Published September 6, 2011

“Big Questions, Not Project Evaluations”: Blattman on Impact Evaluation

This week in my development seminar, we will be discussing the background ideas and methods proper to development microeconomics.

In order to do so, and to make sure that everyone has a clear understanding of what’s at stake, I must make a necessary digression about the use of linear regression as well as about the idea of causality in the social sciences.

As such, a recent post on impact evaluation by Chris Blattman turns out to be quite timely:

“My point in 2008: to talk about how impact evaluations could better serve the needs of policymakers, and accelerate learning.

Frankly, the benefits of the simple randomized control trial have been (in my opinion) overestimated. But with the right design and approach, they hold even more potential than has been promised or realized.

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Published September 6, 2011

“Hope and Hype Outpace Proven Treatments”: Sounds Familiar?

You would think this New York Times article is about aid and development, especially when glancing at the subtitles (“A Theory Becomes a Fad,” “Conflicting Studies,” “The Next Big Thing”), but I guarantee it’s not:

“But now researchers are questioning many of the procedures, including new ones that often have no rigorous studies to back them up.

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