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J-PAL carries out randomized studies to identify and test policies that could improve education, public health and governance.

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Esther Duflo's commitment to investigating what causes poverty to persist in some developing countries and what works to alleviate it.

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At the 39th Microfinance Innovations After Hours Seminar on the topic of "Evaluating the Impact of Microfinance", Professor Esther Duflo discussed the research she and her colleagues conducted on the impacts of microcredit on communities in Hyderabad, India.

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Esther Duflo, a professor in MIT's economics department, said, that every day, 25,000 children die of preventable causes, adding up every eight days to the approximate death toll of the Haiti earthquake.

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Esther Duflo gives talk at TED conference.

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MIT field experiment asks: What happens when people gain the ability to govern themselves?

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Editor Sylvain Bourmeau talks about Esther Duflo who was in Paris for the release of her new book: 'The human development'.

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Abhijit Banerjee is quoted on the subject of growth in the developing world.

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Olken and his team set out to measure the amount of raw materials that went missing when the government gave local villagers money for projects like building roads.

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Remarks by Secretary Clinton on development in the 21st century.

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MacArthur Foundation "genius" Esther Duflo, PhD '99, field-tests aid programs to find out which ones work-and why.

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A recent NBER paper by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer and Jonathan Robinson argues that a tendency to procrastinate may explain why so few African farmers use fertiliser, despite knowing that it raises yields and profits.

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Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Dean Karlan give their take on the role of microfinance.

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Small credit lines were supposed to trim the practice of high-interest loans in rural areas, but moneylenders flourish.

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Three randomised controlled trials on microfinance unveiled.

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Funded by a $4.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to MIT, and $1.6 million from an anonymous donor, a team of researchers from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) at UC Berkeley have launched the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative.

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Esther Duflo named one of Foreign Policy's top 100 global thinkers.

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A global league of economists called J-PAL is deploying its experimental methods and one all-powerful asset -- data -- to explain human behavior, change how we help the poor, and try to save the world.

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The Infosys Prize in Social Sciences – Economics goes to Professor Abhijit Banerjee in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the economic theory of development, and for his pioneering work in the empirical evaluation of public policy.

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Abhijit Banerjee is among the five scientists and social scientists chosen for the Infosys Prize 2009.

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How nagging text messages can make you healthier and richer.

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Courageous Labs Against Poverty

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MIT’s undergraduates fight poverty one statistic at a time, thanks to coordination between the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

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Esther Duflo, MIT economist and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab, asks why the world’s poorest people tend to stay poor.

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Esther talks to UN about children vaccination and gender empowerment.

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Deworm the World and Partners Reach 20 Million School Age Children in 2009 Doubling Their CGI Commitment Target for Year One

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Case study: what works best in poor countries?

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Prime Minister Gordon Brown comments on J-PAL's work with de-worming medicines and mosquito nets.

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Esther Duflo receives MacArthur Fellowship for transformative work on economic development; has brought field experiments to studies of poverty around the world.

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Billions of dollars and a Nobel Prize later, it looks like ‘microlending’ doesn’t actually do much to fight poverty

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What balance between financial sustainability and social issues in the microfinance sector?

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Maitreesh Ghatak analyzes the effectiveness of microfinance.

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There appear to be cheaper, more effective ways to improve education in developing nations than the glitzy One Laptop per Child program.

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IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

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It's not just that we do not know enough about the outcomes of anti-poverty schemes. It’s also that lack of knowledge could make us pick or choose the wrong schemes.

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MICROCREDIT looks like a miracle. It involves providing unsecured small loans to poor people in developing countries whom most banks would turn away. Yet these small borrowers almost always repay their loans (and the fairly steep interest charges) on time, which suggests that they find productive uses for the money. The industry’s backers make some big claims as a result: Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the father of microfinance, reckons that 5% of Grameen Bank’s clients exit poverty each year. Yet economists point out that there are surprisingly few credible estimates of the extent to which microcredit actually reduces poverty.

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NREGA must be improved upon through randomized evaluation, not anecdotal evidence

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The Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, in cooperation with the Government of Andorra, and the Credit Andorrà Bank Foundation, is pleased to announce that the first edition the Calvó Armengol International Prize, established in the memory of Prof. Antoni Calvó-Armengol, has been awarded to Prof. Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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On Tuesday, May 5th, at the New Yorker Summit, Dorothy Wickenden spoke with Esther Duflo and Jeffrey Sachs about using economics to alleviate poverty in developing nations.

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MIT today announced that alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel has committed a substantial gift to support the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in its mission to reduce poverty worldwide by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence. The Lab, named in honor of Mr. Jameel's father in 2005, is based in the Department of Economics in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Jameel's new commitment will allow J-PAL to expand its work over the next five years and well into the future with the primary goal of improving the lives of 100 million people worldwide by 2013.

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For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy. One reliable way to solve this problem is through education. The more affordable it is, the longer girls will stay in school and delay pregnancy.

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Éducation, microcrédit, politiques de santé… Comment peut-on véritablement tester l’efficacité d’une politique publique ? Esther Duflo expose les principes de la méthode expérimentale qu’elle a mise au point sur de multiples terrains à travers le monde.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=0

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A young French development economist is reinvigorating her profession by pioneering new anti-poverty strategies focused on experiment and evaluation.

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NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 21 - Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Friday said that the government was committed to deworm school children, terming it as an effective health intervention in improving students’ participation in schools.

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A new research paper by Pascaline Dupas, an economist at U.C.L.A., finds that a recent field experiment did have some success in reducing teenage sex and, presumably, H.I.V. contraction. When teens were told in school that adults had higher H.I.V. rates than teenagers, they seemed to alter their sexual behavior.

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El J-PAL depende del Departamento de Economía de esa universidad, que encabeza el chileno Ricardo Caballero, y su acción apunta a evaluar y recomendar programas sociales.

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Madame Figaro. – Monique Canto-Sperber, qui dirige l’École normale supérieure, nous rappelait (notre édition du 11 octobre 2008) que le Collège de France compte aujourd’hui cinquante-quatre professeurs, dont… trois femmes. Dans tous les systèmes qui fonctionnent sur la cooptation entre pairs, on constate que les femmes sont plus que rares, ajoutait-elle. Vous êtes donc la quatrième : comment avez-vous vécu votre entrée dans cette illustre institution ?

Esther Duflo. - Très bien ! Le monde de l’économie est essentiellement masculin, j’ai donc l’habitude d’être une femme dans une mer d’hommes ! Mais la façon dont les femmes du Collège de France – les Prs Anne Cheng, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Anne Fagot-Largeault (1) – m’ont accueillie était très touchante. Elles l’ont fait avec une joie particulière

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The dominant image of an Indian police officer, etched in people's minds and embedded in movies, is that of a slothful, rude, potbellied and bribe-taking constable. But the police officers protest the depiction as unfair, saying they are overworked, underpaid and subject to abrupt transfers that disrupt any attempt to get to know the neighborhoods they pledge to protect. Learn more

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For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=21

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Ce mois-ci, nous avons rencontré Esther Duflo, première titulaire de la chaire Savoirs contre pauvreté, au Collège de France. Elle a reçu plusieurs prix courronnant son approche innovante de l’étude du développement économique et de la pauvreté.

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El nombre de Esther Duflo dice todavía muy poca cosa a la mayoría de los franceses, ignorantes del prestigio que esta compatriota suya ha adquirido en los últimos años allende las fronteras del Hexágono.

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Good governance is widely recognized as an important precondition for economic development. Usually, maintaining law and order and a stable society is the domain of the police. In order for police to function effectively as agents of society, mutual trust and understanding is essential. The public perception of the police is nearly as important as the actual conduct of the police force itself in maintaining rule of law. There is a wealth of evidence that currently suggests the police force of Rajasthan suffers not only from institutional problems such as inefficiency and political interference, but also from poor public image and lack of communication with the community. Learn more

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MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which uses scientific methods to assess the effectiveness of poverty relief and development programs, has been given a major new international award in recognition of its contributions and innovations.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards seek to recognize and encourage world-class research and artistic creation by awarding 3.2 million euros (about $4 million) in eight categories such as basic science, climate change, arts and biomedicine.

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En 2007 se destinaron casi 79.000 millones de euros en todo el mundo a ayuda oficial al desarrollo. Pero "se está gastando mal mucho de ese dinero, guiados por ideologías o creencias políticas, pero con muy poca fe en la ciencia", asegura por teléfono el economista Abhijit Banerjee (India, 1961). Por eso, el Laboratorio de Acción contra la Pobreza Abdul Lateef Jameel (J-PAL), que Banerjee codirige en el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT, en sus siglas inglesas), se ha entregado a la tarea de aumentar el conocimiento científico sobre qué mecanismos funcionan en la ayuda a la cooperación y cuáles no, y en dar a los responsables políticos y de organismos internacionales las herramientas más precisas para poder gastarlo bien.

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The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Development Cooperation category has gone in this inaugural edition to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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El Laboratorio de Acción contra la Pobreza Abdul Latif Jameel (J-Pal), del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts recibió este martes un premio dotado con 400.000 euros (520.000 dólares) por aplicar un método científico para evaluar la eficacia de las ayudas al desarrollo.

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El Laboratorio de Acción contra la Pobreza del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts ha obtenido hoy el Premio Fundación BBVA por la aplicación de métodos científicos para medir la eficacia de las políticas y ayuda al desarrollo: desde el uso de mosquiteras contra la malaria a la subvención para fertilizantes.

Su técnica pionera, similar a los ensayos aleatorios de vacunas y medicamentos, acaba de ser aplicada por el laboratorio para analizar la concesión de micro-créditos en países de América Latina, ha declarado vía telefónica su codirectora, la francesa Esther Duflo.

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Para o economista indiano, o sonho da “nova classe média” mundial é que os filhos não voltem à pobreza.

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Le célèbre Collègede France, à Paris,créé par François Ier, s'offre une curede jeunesse. Il vient d'ouvrir ses portesà Esther Duflo, 36 ans, connue aux États-Unis, ignorée jusque-làen France. Portraitet parcours d'une jeune économiste atypique.

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While the West threw billions at global poverty, Esther Duflo tried to solve the problem with science. It has made her France's most fêted thinker, says John Lichfield.

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The unassuming development economist, recently named as one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world, this week became the youngest woman ever to lecture at one of France's most prestigious institutions when she addressed the Collège de France – a 500-year old open university on the Left Bank in Paris.

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A new program that combines cheap, paper-based diagnostics with text-messaging technology could improve tuberculosis (TB) treatment in poor countries. The program, which is the brainchild of engineers, economists, and entrepreneurs at the Innovations in International Health (IIH) project at MIT, rewards patients who adhere to the lengthy TB drug regimens with cell-phone minutes. Called XoutTB, the diagnostics have proved successful in a pilot field test in Nicaragua; a larger trial will begin this month in Pakistan.

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Il y a encore dix ans, bon nombre de jeunes chercheurs en économie du développement clôturaient leur thèse, pourtant basée sur des analyses de données serrées et techniques, en rêvant d'un monde où l’approche expérimentale chère aux sciences "dures" pourrait être appliquée au terrain de la lutte contre la pauvreté.

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Many things that could have reduced poverty-better education, better health, better access to public distribution system-all those things have failed miserably.

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There is new evidence of that from Kenya, whose education system is at the cutting edge of a newly popular type of economic analysis, the randomised controlled trial. In the latest example – studied by the economists Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer – 121 Kenyan schools were given a grant to hire an extra teacher and so split one large reception class into two smaller classes.

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Right now, every group claims that every intervention "works," and it’s hard to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. We invest money on hunches rather than use the tools that any business would use in deciding whether to roll out a product. But of course randomization and rigorous evaluation are both expensive and count as administration and overhead, and so they aren’t funded. The best work on that isn’t being done within the aid world but by academics at MIT, in the Poverty Action Lab there.
At the recently concluded Bank Economists’ Conference in Mumbai, MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee presented the findings of a study (Bank Financing in India: Abhijit Banerjee, S Cole and E Duflo, April 2003) that showed that banks in India do not lend to smaller firms, in spite of strong demand from the latter, and in spite of the profitability of the firms improving substantially after access to bank loans. In other words, it would make good business sense for banks to lend to such companies.

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Michael Kremer, another of those we cited ten years ago, can also claim an intellectual relative in this year’s cohort. Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) received more recommendations than any other economist. Some who didn’t nominate her thought she was too established to count as "new".

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Esther Duflo: La Française a fonde le Poverty Action Lab, qui est devenu une place forte de l'economie du developpement. Pour le savoir, Esther Duflo, cofondatnce en 2003 du Poverty Action

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Throwing money at the developing world isn't going to fix it. So the Poverty Action Lab found a way to measure the usefulness of a textbook.

Picture this: You're the head of an aid agency working to improve conditions in an impoverished African nation, and you've got $50 million to spend as you see fit. So you pick a hundred struggling schools and supply them with the works--teacher training, new textbooks, free meals for students, a free medical clinic. And at the end of the school year, hey, presto, attendance and grades have gone up across the board, just as you'd hoped. That's great.

But what have you learned?

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The pilgrimage that brings more than 2 million Muslims to Mecca every year tends to make them more religiously observant and also more tolerant, a huge study of Pakistani pilgrims suggests.

Hamoud al-Massri, of Egypt, says that after this year's hajj, he will read more about people of different cultures.

Muslims who undertake the hajj "return with more positive views towards people from other countries," are more likely to say "that people of different religions are equal," and are twice as likely as other religious Muslims to condemn Osama bin Laden, the study found.

The study is "Analyzing the Impacts of the Hajj Pilgrimage to Mecca," by David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Michael Kremer (of the MIT Poverty Action Lab), published April 23, 2008.

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School-based deworming programmes dramatically improve child health and education at low cost

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=1

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At a recent microfinance conference hosted by Innovations for Poverty Action, the Financial Access Initiative and Yale University, the Philanthropy Action editors sat down with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, two of the founders of the Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at MIT. Duflo, Banerjee and the other JPAL economists apply the rigor of randomized controlled trial techniques (the same approach used by the medical industry to determine if a drug or treatment does what it was designed to do) to poverty interventions to identify whether or not a program is effective. Below, they highlight the poverty interventions they view as consistently effective and provide insight into where individual donors can make a true impact.

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Fisman and Miguel strongly back the idea of randomized testing for anti-poverty interventions, an idea that is being pushed with great success by the Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T. Randomized testing is expensive but very useful and has come up with important evidence of what is cost-effective. For example, the most efficient way to get more kids in school turns out not to be building schools, but deworming children.

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Rigorous Evidence: Key to Progress Against World Poverty?

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At the 2008 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Bill Clinton honored the commitment to deworm 10 million children and the work of Deworm the World. Deworm the World was established by the Education Group of the Forum of Young Global Leaders to promote mass school-based deworming on the findings of J-PAL research. Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo and Rachel Glennerster (all J-PAL members) are board members of Deworm the World.

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"...Esther Duflo, the co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has answered almost all of your questions. To illustrate her points about poverty reduction, she’s given examples from several different countries - and she’s pointed you to the original articles by a who’s who of the new generation of development economists."

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Eighty per cent of the world’s 140 million undernourished children lack essential micronutrients

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Edward Miguel of UC Berkeley and J-PAL affiliate assesses the prospects for sustained growth with commentaries from a variety of authors including Rachel Glennerster from J-PAL. In his response, Miguel argues that rigorous evidence on what works is key to improving outcomes in Africa.

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Considered one of the top Indian economists today, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee , Ford Foundation International professor in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is rooted in details. A passionate empiricist, Prof Banerjee co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the institute. Along with his colleagues, he has delved deep into the implementation of the flagship social sector programmes of the government. In particular, they studied delivery of government-sponsored primary education and primary health programmes in Udaipur, Rajasthan and came to some shocking conclusions. In an interview during his recent visit to New Delhi, he overturned conventional wisdom about successes and failures of the government’s social welfare programmes. Excerpts:

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Esther Duflo has been named as one of Foreign Policy's top 100 intellectuals.

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Does going to Mecca make Muslims more moderate?

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The question of whether development aid is effective in fighting poverty has been subject of controversial debates, often based on ideological assumptions. Searching for a general answer is similarly futile than the question whether government expenditures are good or bad: it will depend on how the money is spent. It is therefore important to know which development projects are most effective in fighting poverty.

In recent years, the methods with which such evaluations can be conducted have seen important improvements, through the use of randomized studies, which have been developed and promoted in large part by researchers of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab.

This article describes the randomized evaluation methods, illustrated by studies that allowed detecting large differences in cost-effectiveness between a-priory similarly plausible educational projects and provides a discussion of methodological limits (external validity, etc) and ways to mitigate them.

It concludes that if aid has had mixed results, the reaction should not be resignation, but a reorientation of aid to a more evidence based selection of interventions. If the new approaches were more widely used and had a direct impact on the distribution of the money, the quality of development aid could be increased substantially.

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Eradicating hookworm in the U.S. South brought about dramatic changes. We can do the same in Africa.

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Economists at M.I.T.’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab have found no evidence that paying for a product in the developing world changes how people use it.

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Today's pledge by President Bush to invest $350 million in fighting Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) over the next 5 years is one of the wisest investments we can make in combating poverty around the world. This is particularly true when children are mass treated for common diseases through schools. While development initiatives are often driven by sentiment, school based treatment of neglected diseases is backed by rigorous evidence.

Over 400 million school-aged children are infected with parasitic worms (schistosomiasis and soil transmitted helminthes - two of Bush's neglected diseases) which leave them anemic and listless, and so they often skip school or find it hard to concentrate. Yet they can be treated with safe effective drugs for just 50 cents per year per child. Indeed, the evidence shows that mass treatment for these neglected diseases is both the most cost effective way to increase school participation of any intervention yet rigorously tested and one of the world’s most cost effective ways to improve health. These health and education benefits can have long run benefits on productivity and earnings.

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... Who, in other words, was using economics to make the world a better place?

I received dozens of diverse responses, but there was still a runaway winner. The small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, were mentioned far more often than anyone else.

Ms. Duflo, Mr. Banerjee and their colleagues have a simple, if radical, goal. They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics.

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While no woman has been president of the United States — yet — the world does have several thousand years’ worth of experience with female leaders

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Professors Banerjee and Duflo's research is cited in this article about the middle class of emerging economies.

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TIME's business and economics columnist, Justin Fox, features Deworm The World event at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

"...This was all the doing of Deworm the World, an initiative that's grown out of research by MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab showing that kids who have taken antiworm medicine are more likely to attend school and do well than their worm-ridden peers..."

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On insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), at least. There has been an ongoing battle between Sachs and segments of the global public health community on the appropriate delivery mechanisms for ITNs. The efficacy of ITNs in preventing malaria exposure is not in question. What has been debated is whether ITNs should be distributed free (the Sachs position) or at a positive, albeit subsidized price. Those who favor the latter argue, in part, that charging a fee makes the program more sustainable and that it reduces wastage from giving away the nets to those who do not need or will not use it.
A new randomized experiment carried out by Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas reaches striking and unambiguous results.

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As the United States contemplates the possibility of its first female president, we look at India, which in 1992 mandated a place for women in local governments. Esther Duflo of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab found that women there lead differently than men.

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Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

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- ¿Es positivo dar libros a los niños de países en vías de desarrollo para mejorar su educación?
- Sí, claro!
- ¿Cómo lo sabes?
- Hombre, me imagino que…
- No imagines nada. ¿Es más efectivo que proporcionarles un profesor adicional, o darles desayuno gratuito?
- No lo se… Una cosa no quita la otra…
- Si tienes un presupuesto ajustado sí.
- Pero mejor tener libros que no tenerlos. Yo creo que….
- No creas nada. Es un tema demasiado serio para abordarlo según lo que “creas”. Si tu objetivo es mejorar la educación en un país como Kenia, y dispones de unos recursos limitados, deberías tener muy claro cuál es la forma más eficiente de gastarlos.

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Africa's best hope to fight malaria is the wide distribution of mosquito-repelling bed nets. But who best serves that need: the public sector or private interests?

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The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (J-PAL) has outlined plans to fight global poverty in continuation of its ongoing efforts.

J-PAL has been fighting global poverty by ensuring that policy decisions are based on scientific evidence. It has now intensified its efforts in realizing its objectives.

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Ideas in economics can sometimes prompt policies that promote the greater good. But ideas motivated by idealism and then pursued with intense commitment are rare. Yet these are the qualities that make Michael Kremer, the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, so special, according to his many colleagues and students.

As Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kremer's colleague and coauthor, explains: "When most economists come up with an idea that might make the world a better place, they assume that they must have got it wrong, on the grounds that if it were correct it would be in place already, and, reluctantly, decide to forget about it. Michael immediately starts to think of ways to make it happen."

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Dean Karlan, assistant professor of economics at Yale, has been given a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor for beginning researchers in the United States.

(...)

According to the award citation, Karlan was chosen “for his outstanding contributions to the fields of behavioral, experimental, developmental and financial economics; and for providing students with hands-on experience in field experiments and international collaborations.”

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A popular approach to 'sustainable development' doesn't work, critics say

THE HOLY GRAIL of international development has long been sustainability - creating markets and institutions that will flourish after Western donors have gone home.

(...)

For the study that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the University of California at Berkeley's Edward Miguel and Harvard's Michael Kremer followed 30,000 students in the Kenyan district of Busia. Most of the students were infected with stomach worms, which cause anemia, diarrhea, listlessness, and depression. A Dutch nonprofit group that had been marketing deworming drugs to Kenyans agreed to take part in the experiment. It offered free treatment to students and parents at some schools while charging others subsidized fees ranging from 40 cents per family to $1.30. Both campaigns were combined with efforts to teach people about the dangers of worms

The researchers found that charging a fee for the relevant medicines brought use down from 75 percent in a school to 19 percent - a devastating result.

The economists also found that neither free distribution nor social marketing created the conditions necessary for sustainability: widespread appreciation of the drugs' value. That's partly because of the free-rider effect: Once drug use became somewhat common, even people who hadn't taken the drugs shared in the benefits (because there were fewer sources of infection in the area). Those who were taking the drugs tended to stop, failing to perceive that they and their children were any better off than their neighbors.

Miguel and Kremer's conclusions: Only free, continuous distribution of drugs could maintain the progress against worms and keep people healthy, and goods with broad public benefits are ill-served by markets relying on personal choice.

A recent working paper by Jessica Cohen of the Brookings Institution and Pascaline Dupas of Dartmouth found a similar result for malaria nets in Kenya: Charging pregnant women 75 cents for the nets, a common practice, cut distribution within that population by 75 percent, the economists found - and there was no evidence that women who got free nets were any less likely to use them, challenging a central tenet of the social-marketing worldview.

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MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is technically located in Building E60 on the edge of east campus. But J-PAL's real laboratory is a primary school in a sub-Saharan African town, a household kitchen in a home in rural India, an unemployment line in a suburb of Paris-anywhere antipoverty programs are necessary to improve a population's health and well-being.

(...)

To spread its research and promote the use of randomized evaluations, J-PAL organizes courses at MIT and around the world. Last summer, 40 development practitioners from eight African countries traveled to Abuja, Nigeria, to participate in one such course led by economists and graduate students from J-PAL.

"An important weapon in the fight against poverty is good evidence about what works," said Esther Duflo, J-PAL co-founder and co-director and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics.

"The aim of this course was to build the capacity of others--particularly researchers in Africa--to answer questions about what works and to be able to interpret the often complex evidence about the effectiveness of alternative approaches to reducing poverty."

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Mrs. Blair features J-PAL study “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India” ( Esther Duflo and Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, September 2004), during her speech at the Chatham House.

"For example, in recent years India has enacted laws to promote the participation of women in local government, which now reserve a third of all the full-time positions of head of village council and a third of places on many councils for women. A fascinating study by the Jamel Poverty Action Lab at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that in the reserved councils with women leaders, considerably more investment was made in priorities such as improving water supplies.

Depressingly, however, the research showed that even where women could clearly be seen to be outperforming their male counterparts, the perception of both men and women in the community is that they have done a worse job. The only good news was that the study found that, over time, the performance of women leaders did help tackle this prejudice.

But the overall conclusion reached by the study was that there remains a significant cultural barrier to recognizing women as competent policy makers, which explains why so few women are elected or reelected to unreserved seats at the local level."

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Faced with the multitude of problems that result from and contribute to poverty, how can you decide which strategy to use to tackle an issue? One innovative lab is borrowing ideas from the medical world in a bid to find out.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is pioneering the concept of randomized trials, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn't in development and poverty interventions.

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Consider these facts: Many heads of microfinance programs now privately acknowledge what John Hatch, the founder of FINCA International (one of the largest microfinance institutions), has said publicly: 90% of microloans are used to finance current consumption rather than to fuel enterprise. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, recently evaluated dozens of rigorous studies on the economic lives of the poor, finding that regardless of country or continent, very little of each additional dollar of disposable income is spent on any form of investment, or even on food and shelter.

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Based at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai (India), J-PAL South Asia was established in July 2007 due to the growth of J-PAL partnerships throughout South Asia. J-PAL South Asia at IFMR manages the portfolio of projects in the region and works to ensure that the results of these projects translate into action in the region

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It is widely conceded that billions (some say trillions) of dollars in international assistance were wasted in the 20th century. Now the same thing could well happen again.

...nobody knows what works and is sustainable over the longer run. That is in large part because few meaningful efforts are under way to evaluate development projects so that "best practices" can be identified and copied on a cost-efficient basis.

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Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys Inc. and N. Vaghul, Chairman of ICICI Bank and the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) helped launch J-PAL South Asia at IFMR on July 13, 2007 in Chennai, India. J-PAL partners from around the region discussed how randomized evaluations had contributed to their work and the role of evidence in improving policy.

The launch received substantial coverage in the media.

English language press
More English press

Tamil language press
More Tamil press

Hindi language press
More Hindi press

J-PAL South Asia website

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Quiz time: So what do hundreds of millions of ordinary schoolchildren around the world possess that American kids almost never get?

Answer: Worms.

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According to the World Bank, close to one billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day. This despite decades of well-meaning development programs and charitable efforts. A team of economists at MIT says it's time for a new approach -- one that makes prescriptions for poverty as scientifically-based as prescriptions for disease. The World's David Baron has more.

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The noisiest debates on poverty focus on the amount of money that needs to be put to work to help the poor—be it rock star Bono’s campaign to get rich countries to give more aid to Africa or the very public declarations of the Indian government to spend more on education, health and infrastructure to ensure inclusive growth. Unfortunately, these campaigns and policy statements tell us little of value about how money is to be actually spent. Too much money has gone down the drain.

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When you’re lost and running late, it is frustrating to stop and figure out the lie of the land. Nevertheless, that has to be better than speeding off in the wrong direction, however fleetingly satisfying the illusion of activity may be.

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Much aid to developing nations is wasted. Better-designed projects could radically reduce poverty.

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Prof. Esther Duflo’s work can literally save the world.

"I do think it is possible to eliminate world poverty," she says. "Many things can make a big difference in the lives of the poor that can stop this vicious circle. I do believe that people –– and countries –– can grow out of poverty."

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Everyone shares a good deal of cynicism about foreign aid. Taxpayers in developed countries complain that aid is often spent on inflated bureaucracies at home, that it ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators of developing countries, or that it is wasted on useless, if wellintentioned, projects. Governments and citizens in poor countries resent the use of aid as a means of buying political support, their lack of control over it, the development fads to which it is subject, and the administrative burden that accompanies it.

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THIS month the World Bank announced that 986m people lived on the equivalent of less than one dollar a day in 2004—the first time it has counted fewer than 1 billion people in such a parlous state. The bank's definition of extreme poverty is stark, simple and even alliterative. In the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe it as a rhetorical masterstroke. But is it also entirely arbitrary? And how do the poor subsist on such a meagre amount?

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How much do economists really know?
It’s a question worth asking as the forecast season is upon us. Over the next few weeks, hundreds of economists in government, thinktanks and investment banks will run data through their beloved multi-equation regression models, and try to guess how fast the economy will grow during this financial year. Most will predict a continuation of the good times—and for valid reasons, undoubtedly.

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Some of the world’s toughest problems — from poverty to deadly diseases to financial fraud — actually have creative solutions within reach, say nearly two dozen experts on global affairs surveyed by Foreign Policy.

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Poor people may use health products more effectively if they have to pay for them.

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Economists’ framing questions are the same today, but the nature of the answers changed. Since about the 1950s, the norm in economics has been to start from a specific model—a specific set of assumptions about how people make decisions, how technology works, and how markets behave—and to derive, based on mathematical and quasi-mathematical reasoning, predictions about what would happen in a world defined by the model. This has the obvious and immense advantage of making it possible to give some categorical and irrefutable answers to economists’ framing questions, if only within the model’s circumscribed world. For example, one can actually prove that free trade works, or that monetary policy does not, at least under a particular set of assumptions.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=9

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Experts from the World Bank and Ivy League academia called for
cooperation between foreign and Indonesian researchers to find better
and more innovative ways of combating corruption.

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Corruption is a significant problem in much of the developing world.

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Greetings from Rome, where Italy, Canada, Russia, Norway and the UK, with the World Bank, GAVI and the Gates Foundation, have launched the first Advance Markets Commitment.

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The MIT International Development Initiative is excited to announce the launch of the inaugural Muhammad Yunus Innovation Challenge to Alleviate Poverty. The Challenge, named in honor of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus, was initiated and also supported by MIT alumnus Mr. Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, benefactor of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT (J-PAL). Every year the Yunus Challenge will focus on a different problem faced by some of the poorest communities in the world in an effort to bring these problems to the forefront of the academic community.

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MICROFINANCE is based on a simple idea: banks, finance companies, and charities lend small sums — often no more than a few hundred dollars — to poor third world entrepreneurs. The loan recipients open businesses like tailoring shops or small grocery stores, thereby bolstering local economies.

But does microfinance, in fact, help the poor?

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At a time when millions of people each year are still being infected with the virus that causes AIDS, particularly in Africa, a rigorous new study has identified several simple, inexpensive methods that helped reduce the spread of the disease among Kenyan teenagers, especially girls.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=5

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How to fight global poverty—effectively

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Education for all is a popular cause. So popular, indeed, that every decade or two, governments and donor agencies promise to put all the world's children in primary school by some date, normally ten or 15 years hence. In 1990 they set a deadline of 2000. In 2000 they set one of 2015. All that is required, the donors say, is money and will.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=2

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Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want their charitable billions to be spent wisely. So how is the effectiveness of philanthropic aid actually measured?

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Persuading a wealthy donor to match smaller gifts from other people is one of the most popular techniques in fund raising. But charity officials shouldn't spend a lot of time encouraging big donors to offer two or three times as much as other donors give, a new study by economists has found — because doing so won't stimulate any more donations than a dollar-for-dollar match.

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DONORS to charities, it seems, do not behave rationally. Increasing evidence shows that donors often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results — the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.

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Esther Duflo hopes to take the measure of a wide range of anti-poverty programs. Applying scientific methodology, her colleagues and students at the MIT Poverty Action Lab are approaching the projects of well-intended governments and NGO’s (non-government organizations) with a fresh eye. “We have a spotty and scattered idea of the most effective ways to deliver social impact,” says Duflo, so evaluating what works is important.

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A new breed of development economists are using the tools of hard science to put poverty programs under the microscope--and upending a lot of conventional wisdom about what works.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=9

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Dans certains pays en développement, la corruption fait partie de la vie quotidienne, qu'il s'agisse de pots-de-vin pour obtenir un passe-droit ou une autorisation, ou de détournements de fonds publics. Si les affaires retentissantes (les millions de Mobutu, le scandale du programme de l'ONU «pétrole contre nourriture» en Irak) attirent davantage l'attention, cette corruption au quotidien affecte aussi profondément le fonctionnement de la société. Elle est généralement considérée comme une gangrène, mais certains commentateurs y voient un bienfait. Ainsi, Samuel Huntington pouvait-il écrire: «En termes de croissance économique, la seule chose qui est pire qu'une société avec une bureaucratie rigide, trop centralisée, et malhonnête est une société avec une bureaucratie rigide, trop centralisée, et honnête.» Selon lui, la corruption mettrait de l'huile dans les rouages grippés par une réglementation excessive.

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Behavioral economics explains why we procrastinate, buy, borrow and grab chocolate on the spur of the moment.

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Le recenti valutazioni del Civr, Comitato di indirizzo per la valutazione della ricerca, per il settore economia hanno rilevato "(...) una relativa debolezza dei lavori applicati con contenuti empirici (…) [che] difficilmente raggiungono standard internazionali di eccellenza”.

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The depths to which economists go to measure corruption

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=41

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Teacher absence ranges from 20% to over 50% in different states, and makes a mockery of free and universal education. No wonder children drop out in droves, and functional illiteracy is high even for those who complete school. In such circumstances, the government's plan to double spending on education will simply double the waste.

One possible solution comes from Sewa Mandir, an NGO, whose experiment has been analysed in a research paper by two American scholars (Monitoring Works: Getting Teachers to Come to School, by Esther Duflo of MIT and Rema Hagner of New York University) Sewa Mandir runs non-formal schools in hilly, scattered villages of Udaipur district.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=9

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The Rajasthan police have tied up with the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a project to improve its performance and public perception.

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L'idée d'action «durable» exerce une attraction particulière dans le petit monde de l'aide au développement. La distinction entre les actions «durables» et les autres va bien au-delà du respect de l'environnement, qui est l'acception la plus étroite de l'expression de développement durable. Pour paraphraser le proverbe chinois favori de ce milieu, une action durable vise à «apprendre à un homme affamé à pêcher» pour le nourrir pendant toute sa vie, plutôt que lui donner le poisson qui le rassasiera pour un jour.

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At the start of school every day, the teacher sets the camera to take a snap of himself with his students. At close, the routine is repeated.

Special photography classes? No, it’s just to record evidence that the teacher did indeed attend school.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=9

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Governments and aid organizations spend tens of billions of dollars a year trying to lift the people of developing nations out of poverty through better education, health care and other programs. Evaluating those efforts, however, has proved difficult.

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The Center for Global Development is inviting comments on a new draft report, “When Will We Ever Learn? Recommendations to Improve Social Development through Enhanced Impact Evaluation”. The report seeks to analyze the causes for the under-supply of knowledge about “what works,” and propose a specific set of actions to address that problem by coordinating, improving and funding impact evaluations

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Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered the microcredit movement, delivers a talk titled "Ending Global Poverty". A video of the talk is available at http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/289/

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Years of mistakes have taught donors a bit about how to spend aid money better.

The dilemmas of distributing bednets illustrate some general problems of aid. Donors muster resources, but they fail to align the incentives of the people providing them or benefiting from them. The grand macro-solutions often neglect the nagging micro-foundations.

The staff of rural schools and clinics, for example, have scant reason to do their job well. A study in Uganda led by Barbara McPake, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, found that in the typical public clinic, 76% of drugs "leaked" on to the private market, more than a quarter of them prescribed to "ghost" patients who did not exist. Donors, Ms McPake points out, would rather subsidise drugs than pay salaries. Hence health workers make their own money by selling the drugs for themselves. If they did not, the clinics might not have survived at all.

Clinics also levied "informal" charges on their patients, sometimes five to ten times the formal rate. Expectant mothers had to pay for the polythene sheet on which they gave birth; afterwards, they had to wash and return it. Patients who could not pay were routinely abused and occasionally assaulted. The authors heard of a newly delivered baby being "confiscated" until payment was made. Not surprisingly, the poor avoid public clinics if they can--which is just as well, because doctors staff them, on average, for fewer than 13 hours a week.

Such problems mostly surprise and appal donors. But they are predictable and systematic. A cadre of economists, such as Michael Kremer at Harvard, Abhijit Banerjee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Bank economists who wrote last year's World Development Report, are busy working out how to solve them. Some have tried to fix these problems by giving nurses, doctors and teachers incentives to do better. Others hope to solve them by giving patients and parents the power to demand more.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=9

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Congress will get what may be its best chance to salvage something constructive from President Bush's misguided push for Social Security privatization this week, when the House tax-writing committee holds hearings on helping Americans save for retirement. Lawmakers ought to thank the president for raising the important issue of retirement security, sidestep his destructive fixation on private accounts and huge benefit cuts, and focus instead on ways to increase savings outside Social Security.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=38

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The 2005 prize for the best young economist

Esther Duflo was chosen by “Le Monde Economie” and Le Cercle des Economistes” (May 17) as one of two young economists to win the 2005 prize. Although it does not claim the same level of prestige, the prize (created in 2000) is inspired by and modeled on the John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40. It seeks to honor young French researchers who are outstanding both for the quality of their theory and their work on current economic and social problems, thus contributing to economic thought in Europe.

Professor Duflo, 32, received the prize at the Senate in Paris from Thierry Breton, Minister of the Economy, Finance, and Industry. Specializing in development questions, Prof. Duflo was nominated for the prize in 2003. Her success this year recognizes her achievement in creating the Poverty Action Lab, a laboratory setup to fight poverty.

Interviewed by Laurence Caramel Prof. Duflo agreed that the international community had lost some of its momentum in its fight against poverty and that this was partly because of a lack of money and political will but also because of ignorance about the best way of achieving this goal. For example, it is no use having medicines if there are not good ways to distribute them. Similarly, it is vital to evaluate microcredit, in order to have evidence about the effectiveness of this form of finance and to understand the role of increasing ownership by the local population in programs for reducing poverty. Putting more funds into evaluation of projects is, in the long run, the way to gain the support of public opinion and avoid disillusionment about aid.

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AMERICANS save too little. The personal saving rate, currently running at around 0.5% of post-tax disposable income, is at a record low. Poorer people, in particular, have too few financial assets. Fewer than one in three families earning below $40,000 have any retirement savings. And the typical family in this income group has only around $2,000 in non-retirement savings.

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In theory, 401(k) plans and other tax-preferred savings programs can provide a good retirement fund -- if the worker joins up, contributes a substantial chunk of his or her pay, makes the right investment choices and doesn't drop out or tap the account for non-retirement expenses.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=38

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H&R Block Inc. is seeking to extend and expand a federal program that provides a significant cash incentive for lower-income taxpayers to invest in personal retirement plans.

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The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars each year developing drugs to fight disease. For the most part, though, the major drug companies respond to rich-country markets and neglect diseases concentrated in poor countries.

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Abhijit Banerjee reviews Jeffrey Sachs' "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time"

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Esther Duflo’s projects are all over the map, conceptually as well as geographically: India, Ivory Coast, Russia, Indonesia and South Africa are among the locales; retirement plans, the software industry, women and policy decisions, and schooling and the labor market are among the assorted topics.

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De universiteiten van Harvard en Berkeley gaan in zee met een kleine Nederlandse ontwikkelingsclub. Doel: onderzoeken welke hulp werkt en welke niet.

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In 2003, governments spent $68 billion on programs designed to help the world’s poorest people, according to the United Nations. But how can we tell whether these programs are actually making a difference? The answer, according to economists at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, is to compare communities that participate in a particular aid program with similar communities that do not.

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Il problemanonsono i soldi.
Ma come vengono
spesi: a chi finiscono gli
aiuti al Terzo Mondo, chi
beneficiano davvero, come
e da chi vengono misurati
i risultati? Questi interrogativi
sono diventati enormemente
attuali con la gara di solidarietà
scatenata dallo tsunami
del 26 dicembre. La settimana
scorsa alcune organizzazioni
come Medici Senza Frontiere
sono arrivate addirittura a chiedere
di smettere di inviare donazioni,
perché non c’era modo di
trasformarle in interventi immediati
e utili alle popolazioni
colpite e il rischio era produrre
sprechi o, peggio, alimentare
corruzione e mercato nero. Ma
al di là dell’emergenza, rispondere
a quelle domande è ancor
più importante pensando all’opera
di ricostruzione di medio-
lungo termine e riguarda
qualsiasi progetto di intervento
nei Paesi in via di sviluppo.

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Le sida, la malaria et la tuberculose font chaque année 5 millions de victimes, la plupart d'entre elles dans les pays en développement. Mais ces maladies attirent moins de 10 % du budget de la recherche pharmaceutique. Le conflit autour de la Coartem, un traitement contre la malaria produit par Novartis, en illustre les causes.

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Why do some poverty alleviation programmes work, while others don't? Poverty Action Lab, which comprises a group of US academics, has proved that the answers lie in painstaking and scientific evaluation. Some of their work in India and other countries serves as an eye-opener for policy-makers.

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Le budget alloué par les nations industrialisées à l'aide au développement se montait à 55 milliards d'euros en 2003. Parmi les pays riches de l'OCDE, seuls cinq atteignent aujourd'hui l'objectif de 0,7 % du PIB qu'ils se sont fixé au sommet de Rio en 1992. La France prévoit d'atteindre 0,5 % du PIB en 2007, et 0,7 % en 2012.

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Wie bekämpft man Analphabetismus am effizientesten?
Drei junge Ökonomen haben die Entwicklungshilfe mit Methoden
aus der Medizin analysiert. Mit verblüffenden Ergebnissen.

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The World Bank has been criticised ever since its creation in 1944. One of the commonest complaints is that billions of dollars are thrown at aid projects with little if any evidence of efficacy. To counteract these charges the Bank has invested heavily in public relations, but it has so far avoided asking the question: does its approach really work?

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The rural poor in countries like India often benefit more from cheap, simple projects than they do from big, internationally-aided ones, a study by a group of economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found.

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Some critics of the World Bank contend that one must measure whether investments actually help poor people live longer, more prosperous lives.

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Le BJP, le parti principal de la coalition sortante en Inde, n'est pas bon perdant. Dans les jours qui ont suivi l'annonce des résultats, il déchaînait une campagne au vitriol contre Sonia Gandhi, chef du parti du Congrès, selon eux indigne de devenir Premier ministre du fait de son origine italienne.

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La déségrégation a-t-elle bénéficié aux élèves noirs? Jonathan Guryan (de Chicago) montre que la proportion d'élèves noirs quittant l'école avant terme est passée de 14% en 1970 à 10% en 1980 dans les districts soumis à un plan dans les années 70. Pendant la même décennie, cette proportion est restée constante dans les districts soumis à un plan dans les années 60 ou dans les années 80, ce qui laisse à penser que le déclin est bien dû à ces plans. Les élèves blancs, quant à eux, ne semblent pas avoir souffert de la déségrégation.

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Interview with Professor Esther Duflo

Duflo's work focuses on what she terms the "most important and most interesting question in economics" improving the income level and quality of life of the poor.

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Le forum social mondial tenu à Bombay, cet hiver, a attiré l'attention sur le sort des basses castes (dalits) et des «tribaux» de l'Inde. Le meurtre d'un enfant dalit après une dispute avec des enfants de haute caste, l'incendie de la maison d'une famille de basse caste, et de nombreux autres récits d'oppression ont acquis la dignité de matériau de presse. Ces anecdotes tragiques nous rappellent que la situation des dalits reste peu enviable dans l'Inde contemporaine : ils sont plus pauvres, moins éduqués, vivent moins longtemps, font les travaux les plus durs.

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In their report on the healthcare delivery in rural Rajasthan, economists coordinating the research (and also co-founders of the poverty action lab at MIT), Professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Angus Deaton of Princeton state: ‘‘The picture painted by our data is bleak. Villagers’ health is poor despite the fact that they heavily use healthcare facilities and spend a lot on healthcare.’’

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=25

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Every year, millions of dollars are spent on evaluating development programs but these evaluations tend to focus on process: did the money go where it was meant to? How many teachers attended training courses? How many textbooks were delivered to schools? While tracking performance at this level is important, we should also be evaluating programs at a more fundamental level to find out whether, for example, training teachers or buying textbooks does more to raise test scores.

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Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton, in a detailed survey of 100 villages here in Rajasthan, in north India, found a no-show rate of 44 percent. When combined with absences for meetings and other work-related reasons, these vital clinics were closed more than half the time.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=25

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One of the first things that old people did when they grew richer was to move out of their children's homes. A book by Dora Costa on retirement in America records that in 1880 almost half of retired men lived with their children; in 1990 the proportion was only 5%. In fact, as home ownership has risen among older people, the trend in a number of countries has been the reverse: the adult children move in with mum and dad.

[...]

Esther Duflo of MIT looked at what happened to grandchildren there who shared a home with their grandmother after pensions for black people rose sharply in the early 1990s. She found that granddaughters (but not grandsons) grew taller. That suggested the grandmother was using part of her pension to pay for a better family diet. (However, she found no such effect when the grandfather shared the family home.)

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Depuis les attentats du 11 septembre, consultants et économistes s'efforcent d'évaluer l'impact du terrorisme sur l'économie. S'il est évident que le cataclysme que certains ont craint ne s'est pas produit, l'impact de ces attentats sur l'économie américaine ou mondiale n'a pas encore pu être été évalué de manière satisfaisante, faute d'éléments de comparaison.

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Even when health facilities are available, their utilisation leaves much to be desired. According to a forthcoming Harvard study, absence rates among health workers range between 35 and 58 per cent in different Indian States. A similar picture emerges from an ongoing [Poverty Action Lab] study of health services in Udaipur district (Rajasthan). More than half of the health sub-centres were found to be closed during regular opening hours, and even in the PHCs and Community Health Centres, 36 per cent of the personnel was absent on average.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=25

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World Bank money is funding this driving test. A group of randomly selected people in New Delhi is busy trying to acquire driving licences. The instructions are clear: be honest, one group is told. Another set is gently nudged toward touts swarming the RTO. Some are promised a ‘bonus’ if they get a licence real quick.

Everybody’s experience of bribes and babus is carefully noted and studied.

Then there’s a short driving test.

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at Cambridge, who are studying the nightmares of ‘‘bureaucratic corruption,’’ will scientifically evaluate this on-going survey and driving test. Are the honest set better drivers?

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A la naissance, il y a normalement un peu moins de filles que de garçons ; par exemple, le ratio est de 94,8 filles pour 100 garçons en Europe occidentale. Mais cet écart est plus que compensé par la susceptibilité plus grande des garçons aux maladies, qui a pour conséquence une mortalité plus élevée des garçons à tous les âges de la vie.

[...]

Douze ans plus tard, la situation s'est légèrement détériorée en Chine, et légèrement améliorée dans le sous-continent indien. Cette stabilité masque deux évolutions contradictoires : le taux de mortalité des petites filles s'est nettement rapproché de celui des garçons, mais cette amélioration a été compensée par la poussée des avortements sélectifs, avec l'introduction de la possibilité de déterminer le sexe d'un foetus par amniocentèse.

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It is easy, especially if you are an enthusiast, to find miracles where there are none. Assessing benefits of an intervention, as I learnt the hard way, requires thinking hard about the appropriate metric and it is easy to get it wrong. For example, as Jonathan Murdoch has shown, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has shown the way in profitable lending to the poor, in part by counting its fresh deposits as a part of its earning. But it has forgotten that these deposits would eventually need to be repaid.

If measuring benefits is hard, measuring costs can be a nightmare. You have an innovative programme that involves the community in managing the local greenery and it is quite apparent that your programme is doing wonderful things for the environment. But you also know that you have a lot of charisma and suspect that it might have a lot to do with the way the community has involved itself in your programme. How do you, short of cloning yourself, even start to come up with the cost of reproducing the programme elsewhere? Making the programme scaleable from the beginning is probably the best way to avoid this problem, but it does impose constraints on the process of innovation.

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No sample available.

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School vouchers are seen as a way to bring market competition into this stagnant sector of the economy. But results from early voucher reforms are mixed, and these programs continue to face challenges in the courts and state legislatures.

There is another way to bring competition into the classroom: Provide incentives to students in the form of cold cash. Adolescents often have extremely high rates of time discounting; in other words, they respond strongly to immediate punishments and rewards but do not adequately take into account the longer-term ramifications of their actions. For many adolescents the promise of a better job and higher future wages is not enough to motivate them to study today--but a $100 cash award for doing well on a standardized exam might do the trick.

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The political mood in countries like the US has sharply swung ag-ainst aid and multilateral institutions in general. The feeling is that aid has been a failure and there is a clamour to shut down the institutions dispensing it. The neo- conservative right wants to end all aid but there are also those who prefer that it is better targeted to only the good countries. With this prevalent mood, how can one make aid work?

This was the focus of a public lecture by Abhijit Banerjee, professor of economics at MIT, jointly org-anised by ICRIER and SANEI in the Capital. Banerjee outlined a simple example: That the probability that a dollar of aid from a random donor in the US given to a rand-omly picked do-nee in, say, Sierra Leone ends up in the wrong hands or is misallocated is less than one-tenths of 1%.

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Professor Esther Duflo discusses her work with host Emmanuelle Bastide.

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Minorities of all kinds have wrestled with whether to celebrate their culture by giving their children distinctive names, or help them "blend in" with a name that won't stick out. Thousands of Jews have changed their names, hoping to improve their economic prospects in the face of discrimination, as have Asians and other minorities.

Two recent papers from the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research draw somewhat different conclusions about whether a black name is a burden. One, an analysis of the 16 million births in California between 1960 and 2000, claims it has no significant effect on how someone's life turns out.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=3

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Describing her methods, Duflo says that she works “in a very micro way. My projects always consider one simple, stripped-down question having to do with how people react within a certain context.” Typically, her question has to do with how a selected program in a developing country has affected the poor people it was designed to benefit. She amasses huge amounts of data in the field, in collaboration with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and academics, and then subjects the data to rigorous econometric analysis to determine the program’s impact.

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Finding a link between weather, the economy, and witch killings in Tanzania was an unforseen outcome for Edward Miguel, an assistant profess at University of California, Berkeley. Miguel's research on political and economic development in Third World nations led to this surprising conclusion. He discovered that extreme weather - periods of either drought or heavy rain - which lower crop yields in villages in rural Tanzania, prompts relates to kill the elderly women in their families. The women are branded as witches and murdered - typically with machetes.

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Some lawyers and economists estimate that Iraq's foreign debt tops $100 billion. Some economists say much of the debt should be forgiven so Iraqis can rebuild their nation all the faster. But creditor-nations likely would balk at sweeping debt forgiveness.

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Après vingt-quatre ans, Daniel Arap Moi a passé le pouvoir au Kenya. Mwai Kibaki, le leader de la coalition Arc-en-ciel, un regroupement plus ou moins disparate de tous les partis d'opposition, a officiellement pris ses fonctions le 30 décembre. Malgré le soulagement d'une transition démocratique relativement pacifique, Moi laisse le Kenya dans une position peu enviable : le PIB par habitant a chuté de 20 % depuis 1978, la corruption est rampante à tous les niveaux du gouvernement et les services publics sont dans un état lamentable.

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Guest host Susan Stamberg speaks with Marianne Bertrand, co-author of an experiment testing employer discrimination. The study used first and last names perceived to sound like an African-American name or a Caucasian name on resumes with similar education and skills. The researchers found that the names perceived to be Caucasian were 50-percent more likely to be called back.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=3

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What's in a name? Evidently plenty if you are looking for a job.

To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites.

For more details about the project(s) discussed in this article: http://povertyactionlab.org/projects/project.php?pid=3

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Cadre of young economists who study development, including some of most sought-after professors in nation, are dissatisfied with supposed panaceas like balanced budgets, new infrastructure and financial stability; these economists are using basic insights about people's motivations and flow of information to guide policy in emerging economies; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Assoc Prof Esther Duflo epitomizes new development economies with her broad use of theoretical and statistical tools and her willingness to conduct research in fields; Duflo says she wants to find out why world's poorest people almost always stay poor.

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Cigarette taxes might seem designed to make smokers miserable, but a recent study by two MIT economists found that, not only are higher taxes good for smokers, they actually make smokers happy.

"Smokers are made better-off by taxes, as they provide a valuable self-control device," said MIT economists Jonathan Gruber and Sendhil Mullainathan, in a research paper entitled "Do Cigarette Taxes Make Smokers Happier?"