Category Archives: Development thinking

Maybe Sachs will decide he needs some good PR and fund 20 libraries in Burkina Faso?  Who knew FAVL would last longer than MVP!  And probably we’re learning more too.  With his $100 million, we could have established and operated … Continue reading →

The gap between perception (Africa? Are you sure? Isn’t it dangerous?) and perception (Everyone is so happy and helpful and hospitable.) finally can be eroded due to some serious social science effort.  Africa turns out to have lowest levels of … Continue reading →

Reminder that publication bias is important… but seems not to have greatly affected results in a number of reviews. I might have added that an important set of explanatory variables might be the “breadth” of the field, the likely incentives … Continue reading →

Le train d’économies mis en place par la présidente du Malawi, Joyce Banda, se poursuit. Le pays va utiliser le produit de la vente de l’avion présidentiel, 15 millions de dollars, pour aider à nourrir les populations les plus pauvres … Continue reading →

A new paper Cycling to School finds that bicycles are even better than cash transfers (HT: Marginal Revolution). We find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls’ enrolment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in … Continue reading →

I started thinking about this awhile ago.  When I read The Bridge in the Jungle.  If I get some more good suggestions I will update… so put them in comments please. Beppe Fenoglio, Ruin, He is an amazing writer about … Continue reading →

With almost every intervention, she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project. At one point, the Millennium Villages Project persuades the farmers in Ruhiira to grow maize instead of their traditional crop, called matoke. … Continue reading →

Givewell first writes: Thinking of all beliefs as being open to change, and therefore potentially worthy of debate and analysis. Effective altruists research and debate a broad range of topics… Then down a couple paragraphs… We take a different view: … Continue reading →

Loudest among the voices of protest raised against the Dame [Nigeria’s first lady] was Wole Soyinka’s. He took her to task for imposing herself on the people and for acting like a “parallel head of state.” Soyinka called a press … Continue reading →

Partha Dasgupta has written many fine papers, and his talent and work at theoretical analysis are vastly superior to my own… but in this oped Getting India wrong he just doesn’t make much sense.  He writes for example: If the … Continue reading →

One of those questions that is relevant and interesting.  Akachi and Canning use the DHS surveys and trace how birth cohorts have attained different height.  Interestingly, in the simple time trend heights are steady (on average just under 160 cm … Continue reading →

However, using the categorization above, the picture is much clearer. In a random-effects meta-regression model with effect size as the dependent variable and this moderator describing the ‘intensity of conditionalities’ as the only independent variable, the coefficient estimate is large … Continue reading →