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Publications (15)
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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The paper analyses the small- and medium-sized enterprise sector in Poland, seeking to answer the question of whether SME development along current lines is sufficient to assure the sustainable development of the Polish economy. Of the many aspects traditionally ascribed to the SME sector, the most...
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– NEP, NEM and TVE
This Working Paper discusses mixed systems in which SMEs functioned successfully in the presence of extensive state ownership of large enterprises and even classical central planning. Past and present examples are considered in which a small enterprise system worked around, with, and in the...
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– Policy Implications for the Small- and Medium-Size Enterprise Sector
In this paper, the role of small and medium size enterprises in the economic transformation of the countries of Central Europe is assessed. It argues that although these fulfil an important role, they are less significant as agents of macroeconomic transformation than the re-structuring of large...
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– The Case of Hungary with Russian Implications
This paper analyses the Hungarian experience with SMEs development by highlighting the factors and policies that explain the sector features and dynamics and utilizes this experience to suggest an interpretation of the striking differences with Russian SMEs. The case of Hungary is particularly...
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Since 1992 a series of radical and successful reforms of their ownership and governance structures have been conducted by China's small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Innovative arrangements such as 'joint-stock co-operatives', 'joint-stock partnerships', 'grafted joint ventures' and 'small...
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This study presents an up-to-date survey of the comparison issue between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and township and village enterprises (TVEs) in China. Although TVEs are disadvantaged in areas such as technology, labour skills, education levels of staff, access to bank loans and government...
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– Old Myths, Hard Facts and New Strategies in the Successful Transformation of the Polish Economy
In 1994-97 Poland has recorded an outstanding economic performance in terms of GDP growth, simultaneous reduction of inflation and unemployment, fiscal balance, zloty real revaluation, capacity restructuring, private sector growth and institution building. The Polish success needed a market...
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