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Working Paper
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Social scientists are increasingly engaging in experimental research projects of importance for public policy in developing areas. While this research holds the possibility of producing major social benefits, it may also involve manipulating populations, often without consent, sometimes with...
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– Definitions and Diagrams
The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams can...
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In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in development policy. This paper focuses on a core topic in...
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– Opportunities and Challenges
‘Ancillary experiments’ are a new technique whereby researchers use a completed experiment conducted by others to recover causal estimates of a randomized intervention on new outcomes. The method requires pairing new outcome data with randomized treatments the researchers themselves did not oversee...
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– Towards Experiments?
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan Africa shows that the perceived ‘user friendliness’ (or...
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– Experimental and Non-Experimental Methods in Development Economics
This paper provides a survey of six widely used non-experimental methods for estimating the impact of programmes in the context of developing economies (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching, linear regression and non-parametric methods, and...
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– Better Policies? Better Politics?
The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one...
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Differences in economic and theological approaches to debt cancellation result from differences in disciplinary assumptions in respect of purpose, method, and argument. We argue that they provide alternative commentaries upon the need for debt cancellation, but that it is not possible to demonstrate...
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– Perspectives from a New Qualifier, Tanzania
In 1970 the external debt of Tanzania, a least developed country, was 16.8 per cent of GDP and 58.6 per cent of exports. The ratio of per capita debt to per capita income was 14.4 per cent. By 2001 the debt had reached just over 100 per cent of GDP and over 11 times the value of exports, with a per...
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– The Case of Kenya
This study critically reviews the education sector in Kenya and the challenges facing the sector in achieving universal primary schooling. The study argues that the introduction of cost-sharing system in Kenya has resulted in high dropout and repetition rates, low transition and completion rates...
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Kenya’s external debt has continued to swell over the years, and despite the country meeting its debt commitment through regular servicing, this has been done at the expense of key social services such as health, education, water and sanitation. Although good health is a pre-requisite to...
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Sustainable development is a long-term process, and as such must be examined carefully. Development implies structural changes of many different types, ranging from purely economic aspects to those affecting the personal circumstances of people. Changes take time, all the more so when dealing with...
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Late 1990, Egypt witnessed major and radical changes in all areas of its national life—political, legal, economic and social—as a reflection of implementing an economic reform programme in order to achieve progress in its economic indicators. This paper aims to examine the extent to which Egypt has...
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– The Kenya Case
The Kenyan economy had a growth of –0.3 per cent in the year 2001, the lowest growth in the post-independence era. The dismal growth performance coincided with the period when the government was involved in grassroot consultations with civil society and other stakeholders, to find out the causes of...
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– A Case for Enhanced HIPC Initiative
The financing of Pakistan’s substantial current account deficits within the framework of IMF and the World Bank structural adjustment programmes—about 6 per cent of GDP in the early 1990s led to a debt crisis in the late 1990s. IMF considered this level of current account deficit quite feasible in...
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The objective of this paper is to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of debt relief savings for poverty reduction in HIPC countries by focusing on one important channel of impact—human capital accumulation. Our simulation results suggest that poverty and growth objectives would be...
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