Digital Archive....

New York City runs RCT, receives complaints that money doesn't grow on trees Innovations for Poverty Action Blog It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without. Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness.  ... But some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance. From the New York Times .  It always amazes me when people think resources are unlimited. Why is "scarce resource" such a hard concept to understand? I don't mean that merely rhetorically. The point is so obvious to many (eg, folks affiliated with IPA and JPAL), but yet in public dialogue some argue as if there are no tough choices or tradeoffs. Who made them gabazilli...

The Kenyan Mobile Money Ecosystem White African [ This is a guest post by Ben Lyons of Kopo Kopo , and recently of FrontlineSMS:Credit , who I consider to be one of the leading experts on mobile money, banking and payments in Africa. You can follow Kopo Kopo on Facebook and Twitter . ] Kenya is by far the most exciting, innovative mobile money market on earth. Below is an overview of some of the major and upcoming players. MAJOR PLAYERS Safaricom M-Pesa Launched in March 2007, Safaricom M-Pesa was the first mobile money system in Kenya. It is now the most successful mobile money deployment on earth, boasting use by 51% of the adult population. In addition to person-to-person transfers, you can use M-Pesa to remit funds from the UK to Kenya, pay bills, purchase goods, buy airtime, and, with the launch of M-Kesho, move funds to and from an interest-bearing account with Equity Bank. Fun fact: Safaricom M-Pesa has more agents in Kenya than Wells Fargo a...

Ben Knapen kraakte het 'succesvolle' 3D beleid af in column NRC Vice Versa - vakblad over ontwikkelingssamenwerking Ben Knapen ma akte in zijn column in NRC Handelsblad van 20 januari 2010 het 3D b eleid van Defensie in Afghanistan met de grond gelijk. In zijn Kamerbrief stelde de staatssecretaris echter dat het succesvolle 3D beleid zal worden doorgezet. Ewout Irrgang (SP) wees Knapen op zijn 180 graden gedraaide visie tijdens het kamerdebat van afgelopen maandag. Knapen schrijft in zijn Kamerbrief dat de 'succesvolle' 3D benadering ( Development, Diplomacy and Defence) in het nieuwe ontwikkelingsbeleid zal worden doorgezet. De brief vermeldt: 'Om onze belangen veilig te stellen, is de opbouw en versterking van de rechtsorde in ontwikkelingslanden cruciaal. Nederland heeft, via een geïntegreerde en innovatieve benadering (denk aan de 3D-benadering in Afghanistan), in het verleden resultaten geboekt waarop kan worden voortgebouwd.' P...

Should Megabanks Be Broken Apart? (NYT Room For Debate) The Baseline Scenario By Simon Johnson.  This material was prepared as part of the New York Times' Room for Debate on "Should Mega-Banks Be Broken Apart "?  I strongly recommend the post by Anat Admati . Writing in the Washington Post, in November 2009, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, argued : "Creating the structures to allow for the orderly failure of a large financial institution starts with giving regulators the authority to facilitate failures when they occur. Under such a system, a failed bank's shareholders should lose their value; unsecured creditors should be at risk and, if necessary, wiped out. A regulator should be able to terminate management and boards and liquidate assets. Those who benefited from mismanaging risks or taking on inappropriate risk should feel the pain." But the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation does not create a "res...

What's the most effective development intervention we know? Chris Blattman Picking kiwis? From David McKenzie at the World Bank finance blog , the per capita income gain from 6 kinds of interventions: The paper is here . Quibble with the numbers as much as you like, these are massive differences. After learning that Intel's co-founder was a refugee resettled in the US by IRC, I have begun to wonder: if 0.005% of refugees and immigrants transform the US economy, is the annual gain from immigration to current citizens of the US equally large? See also Ryan Pevnick on the ethics of immigration policy . Sent with Reeder  

Does Capitalism Need Social Business? Financial Access Initiative Blog What do Jack the Ripper, the shortage of affordable housing, and cataracts have in common? They are all problems that can and have been addressed by social finance. Jonathan Morduch recently shared his wisdom on the subject during the Chief Economist Talk series at the World Bank. You can watch a video of his talk and download the presentation here . Sent with Reeder Met vriendelijke groet, Best regards, Henk J.Th. van Stokkom. (mailed from my mobile) www.vanstokkom.nl

RCTs: The hot new idea from 350 BC Innovations for Poverty Action Blog A lot of the papers in say experimental social psychology published today could have been written a thousand years ago so psychology is behind its time. More generally, random clinical trials are way behind their time.  An alternative history in which Aristotle or one of his students extolled the virtue of randomization and testing does not seem impossible and yet it would have changed the world. Alex Tabarrok on Ideas Behind Their Time . Sent with Reeder Met vriendelijke groet, Best regards, Henk J.Th. van Stokkom. (mailed from my mobile) www.vanstokkom.nl

Evaluating the Millennium Development Villages Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Gabriel Demombynes and Michael Clemens published a paper recently lamenting the lack of a rigorous (randomized) evaluation of the Millennium Development Villages Project. Whilst we can't [yet?] give you that, we can give you something pretty similar. IPA is working with a nonprofit The Hunger Project to evaluate their "EpiCenter" strategy – building community centers in villages to provide a holistic set of services in a sustainable manner. The key features of the Millenium Villages Project model are: Evidence-based interventions covering multiple sectors, Participatory community decision-making, Environmental sustainability, Scale-up and focus on the Millenium Development Goals.   The key features of The Hunger Project model are:  Evidence-based interventions covering multiple sectors, Participatory community decision-making, Environmental susta...

A Different Kind of Philanthropy SSIR Opinion & Analysis What if foundations mostly gave unrestricted funding instead of dictating how grantees could spend their grants? What if foundations kept supporting grantees who performed instead of ending funding because the "grant cycle" had ended? What if foundations ditched the whole system of soliciting grant proposals and focused on proactively searching for great grantees? What if foundations expected grant reports to mostly consist of information the nonprofit was collecting anyway rather than specialized requests that sap the grantees resources? It seems like a pipe dream. A wish list of a harried executive director. But this sort of foundation exists. And it is thriving. Located on the second story of a nondescript building in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco is the Mulago Foundation . Run by a staff of three, the Mulago Foundation may very well be a case study of an emergent ...

A Different Kind of Philanthropy SSIR Opinion & Analysis What if foundations mostly gave unrestricted funding instead of dictating how grantees could spend their grants? What if foundations kept supporting grantees who performed instead of ending funding because the "grant cycle" had ended? What if foundations ditched the whole system of soliciting grant proposals and focused on proactively searching for great grantees? What if foundations expected grant reports to mostly consist of information the nonprofit was collecting anyway rather than specialized requests that sap the grantees resources? It seems like a pipe dream. A wish list of a harried executive director. But this sort of foundation exists. And it is thriving. Located on the second story of a nondescript building in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco is the Mulago Foundation . Run by a staff of three, the Mulago Foundation may very well be a case study of an emergent ...

De snelle gedaanteverwisseling Vice Versa - vakblad over ontwikkelingssamenwerking Bij Jack van Ham, scheidend topman van ICCO, ging 'het licht uit' toen hij CDA-kamerlid Henk Jan Ormel afgelopen week bij het televisieprogramma Moraalridders het economisch gerichte ontwikkelingsbeleid van staatssecretaris Ben Knapen hoorde verdedigen. Ook ergert hij zich aan de berichtgeving van dagblad Trouw en Vice Versa over het nieuwe ontwikkelingsbeleid. 'Beide bladen lijken een U bocht te maken die ik even niet volg.' Door Jack van Ham Het is nog niet zo heel lang geleden dat ik Vice Versa en het dagblad Trouw beschouwde als positief kritische volgers van het internationaal zo geprezen Nederlandse ontwikkelingsbeleid. De laatste vrijdagborrel en het redactionele commentaar van de hoofdredactie van Trouw van afgelopen woensdag 1 december hebben mij enigszins versteld doen staan. Met koppen als 'Bezuinigingen bieden juist kansen voor het particulie...

Development is Uneven, Get Over It Aid Watch This a 20 minute extemporaneous talk at UNICEF headquarters in New York on the topic of "Inclusive Growth". After the talk, there is a question, comment, and response session with the audience.  The full video is an hour, if you are really a masochist. (Try this link if the video player above doesn't work.) To summarize the talk: success is intrinsically uneven, so development and growth is intrinsically uneven, not "inclusive". (See the earlier post about the fractal stubborness of uneven geographic wealth .) In this talk, I also mention how remarkably uneven success shows up in just about every field of endeavor. One way this shows up is in a "power law": there is such a strong negative relationship between the frequency of success and the scale of success that we have to use a logarithmic scale (i.e. a scale where every unit increase means multiplying by 10)  for both to be able...

Planners vs. Searchers in 1958 Aid Watch At the 9th meeting of Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in 1958, members discussed two papers by P.T. Bauer on economic development and foreign aid. Over at the Foundation for Economic Education 's excellent From the Archives blog, Nicholas Snow recently posted the account of that discussion from the first issue of the Mont Pelerin Quarterly. The entire issue is available for download (NB: as a 20 MB PDF) here. Bauer's discussants included Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises and the (according to Bill) perennially under-appreciated Herbert Frankel. Given the number of my favorites there or represented , reading these comments is a bit like watching the 1927 Yankees in action (or for our nerdier readers, the Justice League of America). Nick singles out a great quote from Mises's comments, and here is another that captures well the bias that still exists against skeptics and critics in debates over for...

What the average American thinks we spend on foreign aid Chris Blattman 27% of the federal budget vs what they think we ought to be spending (= 13% ) and what we're actually spending (= 0.6% ) [ source ] Sent with Reeder