Category: Development

book review: Economic Gangsters, by Ray Fisman and Ted Miguel

David Evans1 Comment

I just read this during my trip to West Africa (Sierra Leone and the Gambia).  I enjoyed it, and I would have even more if I hadn’t been familiar with much of the research already: I teach at least two of my papers in my graduate economic development class.  My thoughts:

witty, clever, upbeat, all while tackling some of international development’s most difficult issues

Eight years ago, as I crossed the Uganda-Kenya border, I was sequestered in a shack, interrogated, threatened with prison, and ultimately required to pay a bribe by border guards. After that harrowing experience, I returned to my hotel and recounted the story to the first friendly face I saw: my sympathetic colleague Ted Miguel. Ted and his colleague Ray spent the succeeding years studying violence and corruption in poor countries; and this sweet book is the latest fruit of those labors.

What can economics tell us about corruption and violence around the world? More, perhaps, than you’d expect. Ray and Ted use surprise changes in a dictator’s health to measure the value of political connections in Indonesia, rainfall to capture the effect of recessions on violence in Africa, and tricks in the trade data to reveal smuggling. (That’s not to mention the parking tickets – Chapter Four.) They present their clever research in surprisingly clear English, and they draw on the related research of other economists as well. They really know how to tell a story: I was captivated by the opening recounting of Kenyan author Ngugi’s woes and delighted by the creative policy making of Antanas Mockus, mayor of Bogota.

It’s hard not to compare popular economics books today to Freakonomics: Gangsters has the advantages of Ted and Ray’s witty, pleasant voice, more of a thematic focus, and none of the self-adulation that took away some Freakonomics’ shine.

Despite the focus on corruption and violence, ultimately the book is presenting a miscellany of work that is related but isn’t (and perhaps cannot be) circumscribed into a larger theory. Occasionally I found myself wishing a central theory like you find in Malcolm Gladwell’s books. But then again, those theories usually aren’t convincing for exactly the reason that Ted and Ray don’t have one: they are careful and big, broad theories are not. I really enjoyed the clear policy recommendation of Rapid Conflict Prevention Support in Chapter 6, and I look forward to more clear recommendations in the next book. Again, Ted and Ray are careful and tend not to recommend policies that don’t have clear evidence to stand on. Not all scholars are comfortable laying out strong recommendations on limited evidence; two books by scholars who are more comfortable are The Bottom Billion and The End of Poverty. (As I recall, that’s also the self-definition given by an economic hit man!) The main policy recommendation, ultimately, is more evidence-based policy making, particularly randomized trials of development programs (but with a healthy view of the realistic scope for these kinds of trials).

This book won’t just show you that economists can be clever (although it will show you that): It shows that economics, cleverly applied, can illuminate some of the most intractable development problems of our time. I strongly recommend it. And if you don’t trust me, Publishers Weekly said that in this “surprisingly spry” read, “fascinating insights abound” [1]. Take it from both of us and learn something.

[1] Publishers Weekly, 6 October 2008.

give me some of your tots

David Evans1 Comment

Sierra Leone is my new favorite country. Some months ago I posted about the used clothing market in Africa and showed this picture taken at Freetown’s ferry port.

Friday, sitting in a car in Freetown (as the driver searched for a lost hubcap), a young man passed with a shirt that said

Give me some of your tots

with a picture of tater tots. For those not in the know, both the picture above and the line above come from the film Napolean Dynamite. Sierra Leoneans have the best taste ever.

I very unfortunately did not have my camera this time.

5 questions in lots of languages: a collection

David Evans3 Comments

As I travel around, I collect currency for my dad and sand for my cousin, but besides the names of authors, I haven’t really gotten psyched about collecting anything myself except crazy assault stories.

However, I might start collecting languages.  Specifically, recordings of people speaking different languages.  I think it would be interesting to collect (and post) recordings of the same 5 questions or statements in a host of different African (to start) languages.

The first question is, What would be interesting to hear expressed or said in lots of languages?

Any ideas?

we need more tour guides like this guy

David Evans1 Comment

Edward Bruner worked as an anthropologist cum tour guide in Indonesia in 1987.

On the second day of the tour in Jakarta, we had gone to the port, to the National Museum, and to visit other attractions. Because I had been to these sites many times, I began to photograph the tourists photographing the Indonesians. At the end of the day, Lisa [Bruner’s boss] told me to stop taking photographs of the tourists as it made them uncomfortable. My hope had been to discuss with the tourists how the Indonesians might feel being photographed by the members of an American tour group, as the tourists never asked the Indonesians for their permission. My aim was to induce some reflexivity and awareness of tourism itself, to ask the tourists to examine their own subject position, but it was not to be.

from Bruner’s Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, p2, which I almost didn’t start because the book jacket calls Bruner a professor of “interpretive theory,” among other things.

okay, i’ll randomize; but how should i do it?

David Evans2 Comments

A few months ago I read this paper on how to do randomization; it has just come on-line, and I recommend it highly. Meanwhile, I summarized it; here are the greatest hits.In Pursuit of Balance: Randomization in Practice in Development Field Experiments
By Miriam Bruhn (WB) and David McKenzie (WB, IZA, BREAD)

The plan:

Randomized experiments are increasingly used in development economics. … This paper carries out an extensive review of the randomization methods used in existing randomized experiments, presents new evidence from a survey of leading development economists, and carries out simulation results in order to provide guidance for researchers considering which method to use for randomization.

The shortest summary of results:

in samples of 300 or greater, the different randomization methods perform similarly in terms of achieving balance in outcomes variables at follow-up. In smaller samples, however, the choice of randomization method is important, with matching and stratification performing best at achieving balance. Moreover, the ex-post analysis should explicitly account for how the randomization was conducted by including the appropriate controls. [Don’t worry: they tell us how!]

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repeat a grade or just drop out?

David Evans4 Comments

Across the African countries I have worked in, I have been surprised at the high rates of grade repetition. In the United States, grade repetition is relatively rare (in my experience) whereas in Kenya almost every child I knew had repeated at least one grade.

Three researchers shed some light on the topic in a new working paper: Promotion with and without Learning: Effects on Student Enrollment and Dropout Behavior. They provide the arguments for both high grade repetition and low, a literature review, and some new research. Here’s the new stuff.

This study examines a different aspect of the debate about grade retention and promotion. In particular, we explicitly consider how parents process the information that grade promotion or retention provides about student achievement and integrate that information into parental decisions regarding their children’s schooling.4 In developing countries, even at the earliest grades, parents implicitly evaluate whether the value of their schooling dominates the opportunity costs of child time outside of school, and these assessments may be influenced by whether the child is perceived to be learning from school.

And the findings

Even more striking, largely illiterate parents appear to base their decisions of whether to send the child to school for another year largely on merit-based promotions. Promotions that are not correlated with measured student cognitive attainments have a much smaller positive impact on the probability of school continuation. This finding implies that parents make their decisions regarding a child’s continued schooling on the basis of perceived learning in the previous year, rather than on promotion or repetition per se. It would also suggest that if a child’s ability to learn in future years is reduced by being placed in a grade for which the child is unprepared, then promotion could lead to increased dropout.

More below

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really enjoying economic gangsters

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Fisman and Miguel’s Economic Gangsters starts out with the story of Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s return to Kenya in 2004 with optimism in the face of a newly elected democratic government.*  He was subsequently victimized horrifically at the hands of thugs, which victimization many imagined was politically motivated. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.” I’m only in chapter two, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the book. I always worry that these popular economics books will just be Freakonomics 7.0 (like Ian Ayres’s Super Crunchers, which is basically that albeit enjoyable nonetheless).

Thus far, Fisman and Miguel distinguish themselves in two ways: (1) the theme is clearly defined. Corruption and violence are massive elements of development, and this book tries to look inside those phenomena. (2) The writing is really good. It’s nice to read.

As always, I’ll let you know when I get through it; but thus far, it’s a recommended read.

Here is an interview with the authors.

[Caveat: Miguel is a good friend of mine, which affected my getting to the book a little faster than I would have otherwise, but not – at least consciously – my evaluation of it.]

*I’m a fan of Ngugi and reviewed his latest book here.

maternal mortality in sierra leone

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This Saturday I leave for another trip to Sierra Leone, and I was surprised to see the country on the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post. 

A Mother’s Final Look at Life: In Imporverished Sierra Leone, Childbirth Kills One in Eight Women

The article has some powerful stories, but here are a few facts (plus some analysis).  Here is a photo gallery.

More than 500,000 women a year — about one every minute — die in childbirth across the globe, almost exclusively in the developing world, and almost always from causes preventable with basic medical care. The planet’s worst rates are in this startlingly poor nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where a decade of civil war that ended in 2002 deepened chronic deprivation.

According to the United Nations, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4,800. In Ireland, which has the best rate in the world, it is 1 in 48,000. In Sierra Leone, it is 1 in 8.

Maternal mortality rarely gets attention from international donors, who are far more focused on global health threats such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV-AIDS. “Maternal death is an almost invisible death,” said Thoraya A. Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund.

The women die from bleeding, infection, obstructed labor and preeclampsia, or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. But often the underlying cause is simply life in poor countries: Governments don’t provide enough decent hospitals or doctors; families can’t afford medications.

A lack of education and horrible roads cause women to make unwise health choices, so that they often prefer the dirt floor of home to deliveries at the hands of a qualified stranger at a distant hospital.

Women die in childbirth every day, according to people who study the issue, because of cultures and traditions that place more worth on the lives of men. “It really reflects the way women are not valued in many societies,” said Betsy McCallon of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, one of the few groups that advocates to reduce deaths in childbirth. “But there is not that sense of demand that this is unacceptable, so it continues to happen.”

 

HIV is older than my grandfather

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from the LA times

HIV dates back to around 1900, study shows (by Mary Engel)

A genetic analysis of a biopsy sample recently discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has led researchers to conclude that the virus that causes AIDS has existed in human populations for more than a century, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study, led by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, puts the date of origin at around 1900, which is 30 years earlier than previous analyses.

HIV-1, the most common form of the virus, is known to have originated in chimpanzees because of close genetic similarities to a simian virus. It now infects an estimated 33 million people worldwide.

But figuring out when the virus jumped species and became established in humans has been difficult. The first cases in the U.S. were recognized in 1981, and the oldest evidence of the virus is a 1959 blood sample taken from a man who lived in what was then the Belgian Congo.

Read the rest here.  Or here is the abstract of the original article in Nature.

impact evaluation matters: how long do i have to wait to know if my program works?

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King and Behrman have a paper on Timing and Duration of Exposure in Evaluations of Social Programs. The paper gives a useful (if not adrenaline-fueled – this is a review, after all) discussion of a host of issues to consider when deciding when to look for results of social programs. [For example, what if the program ends up rolling out at different times in different places? etc] They then give lots of examples of papers that have dealt with the issues (and how they’ve done it). Instructive stuff.

Summary: Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. Although there have been excellent reviews of the different methods that an evaluator can choose in order to estimate impact, there has not been sufficient attention given to questions related to timing: How long after a program has begun should one wait before evaluating it? How long should treatment groups be exposed to a program before they can be expected to benefit from it? Are there important time patterns in a program’s impact? Many impact evaluations assume that interventions occur at specified launch dates and produce equal and constant changes in conditions among eligible beneficiary groups; but there are many reasons why this generally is not the case. This paper examines the evaluation issues related to timing and discusses the sources of variation in the duration of exposure within programs and their implications for impact estimates. It reviews the evidence from careful evaluations of programs (with a focus on developing countries) on the ways that duration affects impacts.