Book review: More Than Good Intentions
13 February 2012 § 1 Comment
Only eight months after I finished the book, I thought I’d finally review More Than Good Intentions, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. Dean is my supervisor at Innovations for Poverty Action, as well as the organization’s founder, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was its clear explanation of how academic research in behavioral economics can lead to solutions for real problems of social policy in the developing world. Given the level of popular discontent with neoclassical economics, fairly or unfairly, after the financial crisis, works like this go a long way towards demonstrating that the economist’s conceptual toolbox can contribute to making the world a better place.
More Than Good Intentions opens with a short review of the Easterly-vs.-Sachs saga, and essentially sidesteps the debate about whether aid ever works with a call for more evaluation of extant aid programs. Their chosen tool is the randomized controlled trial. Of course, there are any number of development problems that are not amenable to randomized evaluation. Questions about the ethnicized distribution of government resources or the transnational funding networks of rebel groups really call out for other epistemological approaches. What RCTs can do well is evaluate program-based aid in contexts where funding shortages mean that some potential beneficiaries can’t be included, and this is precisely the approach taken by the research projects summarized in the book.
The rest of the book is thematically structured around financial activities (borrowing, saving, consumption) and non-financial activities (agriculture, healthcare, education). The financial sections of the book are the best non-technical introduction to the topic that I’ve seen. Dean’s interests tend towards microfinance and decision-making, and these chapters give a thorough overview of contemporary Western narratives around microfinance and the many reasons why the financial needs of the poor are more varied than simply “getting a loan.” For instance, whilst an RCT conducted in South Africa showed that randomly extending microfinance loans to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten one did raise those clients’ incomes, qualitative data from the Philippines also showed that the rigid structure of microfinance products drives many people back to the neighborhood moneylender. (The takeaway here isn’t that moneylenders are evil, but that microfinance banks might take a lesson in customizable loan repayments from them.) Another RCT in Peru used list randomization [PDF] to show that nearly a third of microfinance clients use their loans for household consumption instead of business needs – technically a violation of their loan agreements, but a more accurate reflection of their current financial needs.
The non-financial chapters are also consistently interesting, although they tend towards summarizing notable research and policy innovations rather than placing the results within a global context. They’re like the greatest hits of development research. For instance, the agriculture chapter doesn’t provide an overview of agricultural modernization attempts in Africa, but it does shed light on why Kenyan farmers don’t purchase fertilizer when they need it (it’s hard for them to save money after the harvest), and how Ghanaian pineapple farmers spread information about new agricultural technologies. Similarly, the education chapter doesn’t go into great depth about the history of universal primary education, but it does demonstrate that programs as simple as providing uniforms or cash grants to poor students can dramatically improve attendance. One of the most remarkable studies of recent years showed that treating Kenyan students for intestinal worms with a twenty-cent pill reduced absence rates by up to 25%. This result was so spectacular that the researchers started an NGO, Deworm the World, dedicated to reproducing this success.
All in all, More Than Good Intentions makes a strong case for the relevance of behavioral economics to development policy. It’s also an excellent popular introduction to some of the fundamental questions of foreign aid and development economics. I gave a copy to my parents to answer their perennial question of “so what exactly do you do in development work again?” So far it seems to be working.
Ghanaian Education in Hipstamatic
21 September 2011 § 1 Comment
A look at several schools in Tamale in Hipstamatic:
Excellent remidial classes
Experimental kindergarten
ABC breeze blocks outside the Tamale International Girls’ School
The state of tertiary education in Africa
8 September 2010 § 5 Comments
It’s not looking so good, according to this graph showing gross spending* on higher ed in PPP terms, from Understanding Society:
It puts me in mind of a chapter from Easterly’s Elusive Quest for Growth, wherein he asks if it’s the case that African investment is low because there’s insufficient skilled labor on the continent – or whether Africans see few incentives for education when their job prospects on the other end are dim. The obvious vote is for both. See also Iyinoluwa Aboyeji on why the development industry should be funding universities in Africa rather than additional Centers for the Study of Development at Western universities, and Marginal Revolution for some interesting general thoughts on incentives for education in low-income countries.
*Thanks to Alison Cummins for pointing out that this is gross expenditure and not per capita!
Microfinance & child labor
30 April 2009 § 2 Comments
Schoolchildren outside of Accra, Ghana
I’ve seen some interestingly conflicting reports lately on the impacts of microfinance upon education. Someone directed me to one which showed that microcredit clients were more likely to pull their children out of school to do the domestic work which parents gave up in order to run their microcredit-supported businesses, but I’ve also seen another which found that the children of microcredit clients were actually more likely to be in school, as their parents could more easily pay their school fees. I can think of several different ways in which these elements of small businesses, children’s labor, and schooling could interact:
- Maybe the parents who pulled their children out of school to cope with successful businesses worked far from their homes and didn’t have the time to handle both business and domestic work, while successful clients whose children stayed in school worked closer to home and were more easily able to balance the two.
- Perhaps there’s some sort of U-shaped curve of parental income (as supported by microcredit) and the likelihood of children’s schooling. Parents who are suddenly busier with work than previously, but are still too poor to afford to hire domestic help, may be the ones more likely to pull their children out of school – the low point of the U. Parents whose businesses are quite successful, on the other hand, might better be able to pay for both domestic help and school fees.
- This is probably also correlated with whether parents were successfully able to repay their loans. There must be some exogenous shocks to parental earnings that affect both their ability to repay their loans and their financial capacity to send their kids to school – drought, for instance. So one might find microcredit clients pulling their kids out of school for reasons unrelated to their loans.
On an unrelated note, I came across a sentence I totally loved whilst rereading Understanding Poverty recently – “these essays presage what we feel is an important new trend in the economics of poverty: a willingness to take the social and psychological environment of the poor seriously.” This is probably the most fruitful interaction possible between qualitative and quantitative disciplines in the study of development – a genuine respect for the psychosocial lives of the poor.
