Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to better diagnosis and to better-designed...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrollment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

This paper reports a study on decision-making by borrowers regarding take-up of different loan types in a laboratory microfinance experiment setting. I hypothesize that when borrowers are offered a flexible choice of different loan types (here, individual liability (IL) and joint liability...

Economic planning is a term used to describe the long term plans of an incumbent government to manage the economy. Planning is defined as conceiving, initiating, regulating and controlling economic activity by the state according to set priorities with a view to achieving well-defined objectives...

The promise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us — possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts — to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a...

India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been hailed as one of the country’s most creative social initiatives. Since the program was begun only recently (in 2004-05) there is a need to assess household access to this program and persistence of benefits to households not...

In this chapter we explore the popular but controversial idea that developing countries benefit from abandoning policy neutrality vis-a-vis trade, FDI and resource allocation across industries. Are developing countries justified in imposing tariffs, subsidies, and tax breaks that imply...

In modern world the significance and the understanding of different kinds of social policy and key actors are of extreme importance in development of strategic and program documents. The role and contribution of local authorities to social policy implementation is examined through the example of...