June 28, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
Making Aid Work
edited by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
To use international-aid dollars more effectively, to stimulate growth and ease poverty in developing countries, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee advocates using random tests to determine which programs actually work — and which are expensive and useless.
“In many ways social programs are very much like drugs: They have the potential to transform the life prospects of people,” writes Mr. Banerjee, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems appropriate that they should be held to the same high standards.”
Mr. Banerjee proposes that donors and governments rigorously and systematically test social projects, instead of funneling money to one “development fad” (as a contributor to this book, Angus Deaton, describes trendy aid programs) after another.
Fourteen contributors provide essays both critical and supportive of Mr. Banerjee’s ideas. Mr. Deaton, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, cautions that field experiments could also end up in the trash heap of unsuccessful and costly aid ventures — if the programs they are meant to study are not carefully selected.
“We economists and development experts are still thinking in machine mode — we are looking for the right button to push,” Mr. Banerjee argues. “We avoid having to go looking for where the wheels are getting caught and figuring out what small adjustments it would take to get the machine to run properly.”
Random evaluations of social programs, on the other hand, “force us to venture inside the machine. To implement a proper evaluation, one has to know the exact details that define a program. And as economists think about them, they begin to build stories about them and get ideas about how to change them for the better.”
Publisher: MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02142; (800) 405-1619; http://mitpress.mit.edu; 170 pages; $14.95; ISBN 0-262-02615-5.
