What works in development? : thinking big and thinking small / Jessica Cohen and William Easterly, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Cohen, Jessica (Jessica Lee)

Easterly, William, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economic development.

Social planning.

Development economics.

Physical Description:

vi, 245 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, [2009]

Summary:

Recent years have seen a dramatic shift in the fight against global poverty. A smaller, grass-roots approach has grown more prevalent, nearly replacing the traditional big-picture approach. Yet despite this movement, consensus on what works for growth and development remains elusive. "Thinking big" approaches focus on macroeconomic policies, growth strategies, and other country-level factors, while "thinking small" mind-sets utilize conditional cash transfers, bed nets, and other microlevel improvements on a smaller scale.

In What Works in Development'? Jessica Cohen and William Easterly bring together world-renowned development analysts to examine both schools of thought. Why is the big-picture approach in crisis? What are the merits and drawbacks of the randomized evaluations used in analyzing the micropolicy approach? In asking these questions, the contributors attempt to explain what policy has worked in the past, with an eye toward what is likely to work in the future.

Contents:

Introduction : thinking big versus thinking small / Jessica Cohen and William Easterly

The new development economics : we shall experiment, but how shall we learn? / Dani Rodrik. Comment by Sendhil Mullainathan. Comment by Martin Ravallion

Breaking out of the pocket : do health interventions work? Which ones and in what sense? / Peter Boone and Simon Johnson. Comment by Anne Case. Comment by Jessica Cohen

Pricing and access : lessons from randomized evaluations in education and health / Michael Kremer and Alaka Holla. Comment by David N. Weil. Comment by Paul Romer

The policy irrelevance of the economics of education : is "normative as positive" just useless, or worse? / Lant Pritchett. Comment by Benjamin A. Olken. Comment by Nancy Birdsall

The other invisible hand : high bandwidth development policy / Ricardo Hausmann. Comment by Nava Ashraf. Comment by Ross Levine

Big answers for big questions : the presumption of growth policy / Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee. Comment Peter Klenow. Comment by William Easterly.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780815702825

0815702825

OCLC:

294886468