Development Economists Who Go Small Have a Point
Incremental efforts produce results in emerging markets while grand plans tend to come up empty.
Every little bit can help.
Photographer: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty imagesA few weeks ago, much of the economics world came together to celebrate the Nobel prize awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” That approach is the randomized controlled trial, in which economists try out an anti-poverty program -- deworming treatments, for example -- on some region or population and then measure the results against the people and places where the intervention wasn’t tried. In recent years, this approach has rapidly become more popular in the field of development economics.
But not everyone was happy. Some jumped to point out the limits of experiments as a research technique: the sample sizes are typically small, and it’s difficult and expensive to verify if small-bore programs can work at larger scales. Others worried that experiments are being overused at the expense of other approaches.