Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- 1 Introduction: Can't Take It Anymore? -- 2 Making Aid Work -- 3 Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness -- 4 It Pays to Be Ignorant: A Simple Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation -- 5 Solutions When the Solution Is the...

Introduction: Can't take it anymore? / William Easterly -- I: The power of scientific evaluation--and why isn't it done more often? -- Making aid work / Abhijit Banerjee and Ruimin He -- Use of randomization in the evaluation of development effectiveness / Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer -- It...

Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...