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...

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...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

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...

The classic narrative of economic development - poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income - has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. This was the...

The classic narrative of economic development - poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income - has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. This was the...