Transcript
RAJ KUMAR: Welcome, everybody. I'm happy to see such a great turn out for a great book. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the conversation we're going to have today and how interesting it’s going to be.
This is an interesting topic. I just came from giving a talk to a bunch of students who are interested in considering a career in development. And at the end of a long session one of them said, well, how do we actually know this is going to have an impact in developing countries? I said, well, that is kind of the fundamental question, isn't it? And that's what this book really gets at.
And it's a book that focuses on two approaches to understanding whether or not aid has an impact. On the one hand, you've got sort of the big picture which we're going to be hearing a bit about from Bill Easterly. And the big picture includes the traditional macroeconomic analyses and cross-country studies, which try to take a whole range of factors and figure out among them, well, if we tweak this one or tweak that one, what drives growth? And that area of study is a bit in crisis. This is what the book talks about, that it's hard to really know what works.
So, there's another school of thought which has gained providence in recent years, and Jessica Cohen will be talking about that school of thought predominantly, which is the micro approach. Essentially it takes a lot from the medical field, from randomized clinical trials -- RCTs, you'll be hearing a lot about that today -- starting at the small scale instead of the big cross-country study, looking at an individual village and saying, you know, if we insert bed nets, what does it do? And if we can find out what actually works, if we can get real evidence of works there, maybe we can extrapolate that and look at it at a larger scale, and find interventions that we're sure will actually work.
So, this really gets to the heart of what all of us who are in the aid industry writ large are doing. Now the question is, what kind of impact are we having? And if we can't measure it, if we don't know what our interventions are doing, then what's the point? It gets back to the student's question that I just got earlier.
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