Financing the family: Remittances to Central America in a time of crisis. On theories of change: Many randomized control trials in international development fail to pay adequate attention to collecting data around the intervention’s theory of change. And so the authors resort to non-evidence based speculation to explain their findings. But without such explanation the … [Read more...] about Random Monday links
Beyond development effectiveness
Random Monday links
If you are interested in water and sanitation issues, you should check out our publications. Did you know that Mexicans consume almost 5 times as much bottled water as Americans do, per person? Small is beautiful? A recent evaluation of a major UK government funded Community Driven Reconstruction Program in the Democratic Republic of Congo had the biggest sample ever: 1.8 … [Read more...] about Random Monday links
9 useful links
Starting today we will publish every Monday a few links that we find particularly useful or interesting. If you have any suggestions please post them in the comments section. As school is starting it is useful to review some development economics resources and syllabi. Here is Chris Blattman’s on the political economy of African Development at Columbia, Nancy Birdsall’s on … [Read more...] about 9 useful links
Legal bribes?
About a year and a half ago, the economist Kaushik Basu - then a Cornell professor on leave as Chief Economist for the Ministry of Finance in India- proposed legalizing some forms of bribing. Some highlights: There are different kinds of bribes and what I am concerned with in this paper are bribes that people often have to give to get what they are legally entitled to. I … [Read more...] about Legal bribes?
5 reasons why to take a vacation
Now that most of the northern hemisphere is on vacation, most are watching the Olympic Games, and the World Bank Impact blog is in hiatus, I thought we should take a break too. But before we do that, it is good to know that taking a break can be good. These are just five reasons (Hint: happiness and productivity are two of them) … [Read more...] about 5 reasons why to take a vacation