What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small

by Jessica Cohen, William Easterly author of The Tyranny of

Overview

"What Works in Development? brings together leading experts to address one of the most basic yet vexing issues in development: what do we really know about what works— and what doesn't—in fighting global poverty?

The contributors, including many of the world's most respected economic development analysts, focus on the ongoing debate over which paths to development truly maximize results. Should we emphasize a big-picture approach—focusing on the role of institutions, macroeconomic policies, growth strategies, and other country-level factors? Or is a more grassroots approach the way to go, with the focus on particular microeconomic interventions such as conditional cash transfers, bed nets, and other microlevel improvements in service delivery on the ground? The book attempts to find a consensus on which approach is likely to be more effective.

Contributors include Nana Ashraf (Harvard Business School), Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development), Anne Case (Princeton University), Jessica Cohen (Brookings),William Easterly (NYU and Brookings),Alaka Halla (Innovations for Poverty Action), Ricardo Hausman (Harvard University), Simon Johnson (MIT), Peter Klenow (Stanford University), Michael Kremer (Harvard), Ross Levine (Brown University), Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard), Ben Olken (MIT), Lant Pritchett (Harvard), Martin Ravallion (World Bank), Dani Rodrik (Harvard), Paul Romer (Stanford University), and DavidWeil (Brown).

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815702825
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/03/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

"Jessica Cohen is a development economic research fellow with the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of The White Man's Burden:Why theWest's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006)."

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Thinking Big versus Thinking Small Jessica Cohen William Easterly 1

2 The New Development Economics: We Shall Experiment, but How Shall We Learn? Dani Rodrik 24

Comment Sendhil Mullainathan 48

Comment Martin Ravallion 51

3 Breaking Out of the Pocket: Do Health Interventions Work? Which Ones and in What Sense? Peter Boone Simon Johnson 55

Comment Anne Case 84

Comment Jessica Cohen 87

4 Pricing and Access: Lessons from Randomized Evaluations in Education and Health Michael Kremer Alaka Holla 91

Comment David N. Weil 120

Comment Paul Romer 126

5 The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is "Normative as Positive" Just Useless, or Worse? Lant Pritchett 130

Comment Benjamin A. Olken 165

Comment Nancy Birdsall 170

6 The Other Invisible Hand: High Bandwidth Development Policy Ricardo Hausmann 174

Comment Nava Ashraf 199

Comment Ross Levine 203

7 Big Answers for Big Questions: The Presumption of Growth Policy Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee 207

Comment Peter Klenow 222

Comment William Easterly 227

Contributors 233

Index 235