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Publications (24)
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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– Tanzania
Tanzania has not yet successfully had an IMF standby arrangement that ran its course, although several programmes have been implemented at various points in time. These programmes combined demand restraint and structural adjustment with the help of external resources. While demand restraint measures...
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– Côte D'Ivoire
Until the 1980s, the Ivory Coast seemed to be one of the most successful examples of economic development, enjoying sustained growth and rising per capita incomes. This process was, however, seen to be fragile in the 1980s when it was brought to an abrupt halt by the slide in the prices of the...
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– Republic of Korea
The Republic of Korea's growth rate averaged nearly 6 per cent in 1981-85, jumping to 10-12 per cent a year in 1986-87. Inflation was cut from 26 per cent in 1980 to around 3 per cent in mid-1987.The author of the following monograph, Dr Alice Amsden, argues that much of the recovery in growth and...
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– India
India's first two bouts of orthodox stabilization policy following independence were quite different. The first, prompted by a prolonged drought at home and the wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965, was relatively mild in form. The rupee was devalued, the elaborate panoply of export...
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– Argentina
Argentina has had successive stabs at stabilization since the mid-1970s. Throughout most of this time it has had to wrestle with acute problems of hyperinflation, capital flight, rising external debt, a stop-go pattern of output, and for a long time a heavily depressed level of real wages. It has...
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– Brazil
Brazil has undergone three stabilization programmes since 1980: without the IMF in 1981-82; with the IMF in 1983-84, and the Cruzado Plan of 1986. The first two could be said to have been more orthodox in character, given the political and social constraints which have a strong bearing upon the...
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Two factors make the Chilean experience of stabilization policies interesting. One is that probably no other government in Latin America (and perhaps also elsewhere) has been more diligent in pursuing liberal economic policies than the one which took power in Chile in 1973. Almost straightaway it...
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– Egypt
Since joining the International Monetary Fund in 1945 as an original founding member, Egypt has signed four stabilization agreements with the Fund. These agreements were: a credit facility in May, 1962, which collapsed fairly rapidly; a stand-by arrangement in April 1977; an extended fund facility...
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