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Money buys happiness after all Aid Watch Does happiness rise with income? Are people in poor countries less happy than people in rich countries? Much of what we thought we knew on this topic comes from a famous 1974 study by economic historian Richard Easterlin. Easterlin found that within countries, rich people tended to be happier than the poor. But contrary to expectation, rich countries as a whole were not happier than poor countries. And even stranger, in the US, when per capita income rose sharply from 1946 to 1970, bliss did not rise alongside it. To the best of our knowledge, there is not yet any research debunking The Beatles' well-established Can't Buy Me Love Hypothesis (1964) Easterlin resolved this seeming contradiction—known as the Easterlin paradox—by hypothesizing that "[t]he increase in output itself makes for an escalation in human aspirations, and this negates the expected positive impact on welfare." That is, having more stu...

Does Microfinance Work?— A Review of the RCT Literature Financial Access Initiative Blog In the past, the microcredit movement was driven by inspiring stories, but today donors and investors increasingly see the importance of measuring impacts. In order to credibly establish program impacts, having control groups is central, and the development of randomized controlled trials (RCT) is moving methodological possibilities forward. Some of the most well-known researchers in the RCT field include, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo , who just released their new book Poor Economics this week, and Dean Karlan , who co-wrote the recently published More than Good Intentions with Jacob Appel. The findings from their RCTs are central to the stories told in both these books. Nonetheless, after 30 years of microcredit and the rise of randomized trials, we still don't have an impact evaluation that is ideal, but we're getting closer. So we at FAI decided it was t...

Cash transfers: What are they good for? Aid Watch There is convincing evidence from a number of countries that cash transfers can reduce inequality and the depth or severity of poverty. For example, in Brazil a combination of cash transfer programmes accounted for 28 percent of the total fall in the Gini index (a summary measure of inequality) between 1995 and 2004…. Well-designed and implemented cash transfers help to strengthen household productivity and capacity for income generation. Small but reliable flows of transfer income have helped poor households to accumulate productive assets; avoid distress sales; obtain access to credit on better terms; and in some cases to diversify into higher risk, higher return activities. These intermediate outcomes help draw poor people into the market economy on terms that allow them to benefit from and contribute to growth.… There is robust evidence from numerous countries that cash transfers have leveraged sizeable gains...

Held Hostage: Funding for a Proven Success in Global Development on hold in Kenya Global Development: Views from the Center By Justin Sandefur - I was dismayed to learn recently that school-based deworming in Kenya — one of the most celebrated and cost-effective successes in global development in 2009 — was not repeated in 2010.   The story of how that happened offers an object lesson in the gritty difficulties of translating evidence into policy. Intestinal helminths, aka worms, infect [...] Sent with Reeder  

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full

Aging Alone: King George's Home for the Elderly in Freetown Scarlett Lion In January, I went back to the King George Home for the Elderly in Eastern Freetown, a place I'd visited in 2010 and taken many photos. It's a strange place — it's rare for the elderly to live in group homes in sub-Saharan Africa, but most of the people at King George's lost their children during Sierra Leone's civil war. There's a word for children who lose their parents — orphans — but no word for parents who lose their children. King George's is, in some senses, a place of deep sadness and isolation. And yet, it's also a place where people have made friends, cut each others hair, and spend the day chatting and listening to the radio. To see photos from my previous trip, check this out, or visit the whole series on my homepage. It was so wonderful to be back – I was greeted with such warmth and kindness, hugs and laughs. The article in BBC's Fo...

The Rebranding of Philanthropy Tactical Philanthropy A lot of effort has gone into rebranding philanthropy from "giving away money" to "making a social investment". While the shift has supporters and detractors, I think the most useful and interesting way to think about the underlying motives for the shift is as an attempt to move philanthropy from the "should" category (you "should" work out, eat healthy, call your mom and give to charity) to the "want" category (you "want" to have fun, feel good about yourself, eat yummy food). My post last week about the rebranding of baby carrots as "junk food" and the lessons to be learned for philanthropy was meant to tap into this line of thinking. In the Fast Company article about baby carrots being branded as junk food , the carrot company CEO talked about how most all of the advertising companies who applied to work with them tried to make baby car...