How to Find the Poor - India Real Time. A Global Solutions Network by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – Great social change occurs in several ways. A technological breakthrough – the steam engine, computers, the Internet – may play a leading role. Visionaries, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, may inspire a demand for justice. Political leaders may lead a broad reform movement, as with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Our own generation urgently needs to spur another era of great social change. Each of us senses this challenge almost daily. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is taking on this unprecedented challenge from his unique position at the crossroads of global politics and society. In the past two decades, governments have come up short on solutions to environmental threats. To empower global society to act, Ban has launched a bold new global initiative, for which I am grateful to volunteer.
Universities have a special role to play in the new UN knowledge network. Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists | Marc F. First came this post by Joanna Blythman on The Guardian‘s Comment Is Free blog: Quinoa was, in marketing speak, the “miracle grain of the Andes,” a healthy, right-on, ethical addition to the meat avoider’s larder (no dead animals, just a crop that doesn’t feel pain). Consequently, the price shot up – it has tripled since 2006 – with more rarefied black, red and “royal” types commanding particularly handsome premiums.
But there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken.
Outside the cities, and fueled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture. Problem with Western foodies? HKS Executive Education. Albert O. Hirschman, 1915-2012 | Francis Fukuyama. 2012 saw the passing of a great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This approach establishes causality with a level of certainty approaching that of the randomized trials used in pharmaceutical testing. But while such experiments are useful for evaluating the effectiveness of certain types of public policies, they all operate at a very micro level and don’t aggregate upwards into an understanding of the broader phenomenon of development.
It is hard to imagine that all the work being done under this approach will leave anything behind of a conceptual nature that people will remember fifty years from now. Albert Hirschman operated at the opposite end of the spectrum. Albert Hirschman was a progressive. Science, Technology, and Globalization - Conference Announcements - Harvard - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Games in International Development: Fad or Innovation? People have been playing more games these days in Washington D.C. And I don’t mean the strategies of the Obama and Romney spin teams. Two recent events suggest games’ growing popularity in D.C. aid circles: this one I attended at the World Wildlife Fund earlier this month and this Tuesday’s upcoming event hosted by the Society for International Development. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains Games in international development is a pedagogical approach intended to provide experiential learning opportunities that break down complex topics into easier-to-understand parts for adults, thereby serving as more effective “thought and dialogue stimulators.”
In my experience with games, they have been used in place of or alongside more conventional training to help people affected by climate change to understand it, especially the concepts of risk management and adaptation. The natural comparison with games for me is participatory rural appraisal (PRA) or participatory learning and action (PLA).
Brett Keller » When randomization is strategic. Here’s a quote from Tom Yates on his blog Sick Populations about a speech he heard by Rachel Glennerster of J-PAL: Glennerster pointed out that the evaluation of PROGRESA, a conditional cash transfer programme in Mexico and perhaps the most famous example of randomised evaluation in social policy, was instigated by a Government who knew they were going to lose the next election. It was a way to safeguard their programme. They knew the next Government would find it hard to stop the trial once it was started and were confident the evaluation would show benefit, again making it hard for the next Government to drop the programme. Randomisation can be politically advantageous.
I think I read this about Progresa / Oportunidades before but had forgotten it, and thus it’s worth re-sharing. We Can End Poverty, So Why Don't We? | Econ201. Almost everyone agrees that poverty is not a good thing. Almost everyone would like to end poverty. Almost everyone would benefit from ending poverty. So why don't we? To find out, let's look at the problem through the lens of game theory. In every political cycle, our leaders face a choice: how much should they do to fight poverty, a lot or a little? If they do a lot, they'll benefit almost everyone. They're not the only players in this game, though. Now, the thing the leaders want least is to get thrown out, but they also want money to spend - otherwise, what good is having power? And that's what we have - a lot of rhetoric matched by very little action. There is only one way. This is a standard result in game theory. The answer is a popular movement that looks further into the future than just a couple of years, with leaders who are ready for a long and painful fight.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.com. African child mortality: The best story in development. DFID's Approach to Impact Evaluation - Part I.
Training to Save? Does financial education training for children in Ghana help instill a culture of good decision-making? Take a reader survey and find out. Many of us remember the first thing we saved money for, depositing loose change or hard-earned cash in piggy banks. Dean’s son has been saving to purchase a soccer jersey from every country he’s visited with his dad. Annie remembers selling cakes to save money for scouting trips. Little did we know that our parents had ulterior motives for encouraging us to save: they wanted to instill in us a culture of saving at a young age and an understanding of the value of money—in other words, the beginnings of a financial education.
At a time when nearly half of American households carry over credit card balances every month, we wonder: How much did our early financial education affect us? Evidence of the impact of financial education programs on financial outcomes for adults is mixed. Now that you know the basics of what we did, what do you think we found? Design Thinking for Social Innovation. Designers have traditionally focused on enhancing the look and functionality of products. Recently, they have begun using design techniques to tackle more complex problems, such as finding ways to provide low-cost healthcare throughout the world.
Businesses were the first to embrace this new approach—called design thinking—and nonprofits are beginning to adopt it too. In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re not the reasons one might think. Although Shanti can walk to the facility, she can’t carry the 5-gallon jerrican that the facility requires her to use. This missed opportunity, although an obvious omission in hindsight, is all too common. Inspiration.
Can Management Consulting Help Small Firms Grow? Economic development efforts are best served by testing and refining assumptions about what works. Should we assume that small enterprises in developing countries are lacking in business skills—and that guidance and training will improve these businesses? Economic theory says that firms do as much as possible to maximize profits—including paying for advice from management consultants. In developing countries, interventions ranging from quick lectures during microcredit meetings to extended engagements with international consulting firms aim to improve management practices.
These interventions presume that the existing management must be missing something. Two randomized evaluations recently conducted by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Ghana (by Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Chris Udry) and in Mexico (by Miriam Bruhn, Dean Karlan, and Antoinette Schoar) explore this question for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Why did we study these programs with randomized evaluations? Jobs for Billionaires - By Joshua E. Keating. An unmanned rocket owned by the private company Space Exploration Technologies launched Tuesday on the first commercial flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by PayPal's Elon Musk, has spent about $1.2 billion to date -- $400 million of it from NASA -- in its bid to develop private space flight into a viable commercial enterprise.
It's been a busy couple of weeks for rich guys with outer space ambitions. In late April, a group including the co-founders of Google and film director James Cameron announced the formation of a startup company with plans to one day mine asteroids for platinum. Space exploration may one day provide the Earth with tangible benefits. In its 2012 challenge report, the Copenhagen Consensus Center -- which convenes economists, including several Nobel Prize winers, to provide cost-benefit analyses of solving various global crises -- ranked efforts to combat childhood malnutrition as its highest priority. ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images. Poverty: The audacity of hope. Interview: A Business-Like Approach to Foreign Aid - By Samuel Loewenberg. The son of Indian immigrants from Ann Arbor, Mich., and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the Wharton School of Business, Rajiv Shah began his career at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he ran the organization's agriculture program and went on to serve as chief scientist at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA). In December 2009, at the age of 37, he was sworn in as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) -- only days before a devastating earthquake hit Haiti. In an interview for Foreign Policy, Samuel Loewenberg spoke with Shah about how he is reinventing USAID, an often-embattled agency charged with helping the world's poorest countries develop, while at the same time dealing with crises around the globe. Foreign Policy: Dr. Shah, you've hopscotched your way into running the U.S. foreign aid agency at a relatively young age after a career at the Gates Foundation. RS: I don't want to promise. How Not to Write About Africa - By Laura Seay. It's hard out here for us old Africa hands. We are desperate to see more coverage of important stories from the continent and for our neighbors to become more educated about the places where we study and work.
Yet when we get that coverage, it tends to make us cringe. Take, for instance, the current violence in northern Mali. In the last six weeks, Mali has experienced a coup d'état and a declaration of independence from rebels who now loosely control half its territory. The recent conflict has displaced approximately 268,000 people as various groups of Islamists and separatist rebels jostle for control of desert oasis cities as a drought-driven food crisis looms with the arrival of the country's hot season.
The situation in Mali is by far the worst unfolding humanitarian crisis in the world today, but compared with say, Syria or Afghanistan, you probably haven't heard much about it. Or consider the flurry of coverage of Central Africa that followed March's "Kony 2012" phenomenon. Dumb and Dumber - by Charles Kenny. Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others.
Sadly, Derbyshire-like prattishness on the intellectual inferiority of dark-skinned races and its impact on social and economic outcomes in the United States has a historied international equivalent. In fact, if anything, the academic consensus on why some countries are rich and others are poor is tacking closer to the shoals of genetic determinism than it has been since the days of high empire. Derbyshire's deserved disgrace is a needed reminder to throw brickbats at his partners in malodor who work in global development.
KAMBOU SIA/AFP/Getty Images. Poor Economics: Barefoot Hedge-fund Managers, Reluctant Entrepreneurs and the Surprising Truth about Life on less than $1 a Day - Video and audio - News and media. Speaker(s): Professor Abhijit Banerjee Chair: Professor Stuart Corbridge Recorded on 26 March 2012 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building. Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2011 for their analysis of why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. They argue that so much of anti-poverty policy has failed over the years because of an inadequate understanding of poverty. Looking at some of the most surprising facets of poverty: why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why they miss out on free life-saving immunizations but pay for drugs that they do not need, and why they start many businesses but do not grow any of them, they give us all a new understanding of the complex reality of living on very little and offer practical solutions for reducing poverty.
Event posting. The *Poor Economics* in *Why Nations Fail* by Michael Heller. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space A review: The first impression is that the authors of Poor Economics (PE) and Why Nations Fail (WNF) are productively at loggerheads over the causes of poverty and wealth. Acemoglu and Robinson (WNF) find fault in the optimistic “engineering” approach of Banerjee and Duflo (PE) and question their preference for the decentralized “power of small changes” which dispel ignorance at-the-margin in health or education and improve local decision making. The authors of PE criticize the “melancholy political economy” of WNF with its hard-to-change political institutions relentlessly locking-in developmental success and failure. Here is the caricature: WNF is the realistic-pessimistic historical vision of the primacy-cum-stasis of central institutional governance and social masses.
What’s my beef? I do have reservations about PE [previous post here]. WNF gets the Big Picture wrong Big Time. I fully agree with Fukuyama’s complaint. 1. 2. 3. What You Can Do to Stop Malaria. Artful Dodgers - By Joshua Keating. Global development news, comment and analysis | Global development. Branchless Banking in India: 3 More Reasons for Optimism.
Book Review: Why Nations Fail. Experimental economics: Double-blind lessons. "Women on the Verge of an Economic Breakthrough" by Heidi Hautala. "Free-Trade Blinders" by Dani Rodrik. Finanzas - ONU urge a México fijar salario que garantice alimentación. Commitment to Development Index : Center for Global Development. Www.cgdev.org/files/1425806_file_Kenny_Sumner_MDGs_FINAL.pdf.
Should Peru pay for its own development? | Mattia Cabitza | Global development. World Bank. Global poverty: A fall to cheer. Poverty in Japan: Shadowy figures. Focus: Poverty, inequality and redistribution. Onward and Upward - By Charles Kenny.