LSE 2011-12 and the Poverty of Nations

As of now, it looks like I will be attending The London School of Economic's Masters in International Development Management program for the 2011-12 academic year. I am very excited for the intellectual and professional challenge of this program, and have begun to read through some of the required reading. Thus, in correlation with my Schools Project website (www.theschoolsproject.org) I will be posting on different readings and findings in my own academic research and others published works. While I have still to iron out the financial and visa issues concerning my attendance at the LSE, I hold an unconditional offer, and thus, have begun the intellectual journey a bit early.

“Understanding the incentives behind economically motivated acts of violence helped us to develop new schemes to break the cycle of violence and poverty by using aid to stop violence before it starts.”

 -Fisman and Miguel

I have almost completed reading Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's book, "Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations." Fisman and Miguel are Columbia and Berkeley professors and have taken a great approach, ala Freakonomics, to uncovering some of the lingering issues of developmental economics.  They attempt to track the trail of global economic gangsters, those who stymie the development of nations in their individual pursuit of gain, through development issues such as life under Suharto in Indonesia, smuggling and the loss of tariffs in Hong Kong and China, post-conflict economic recovery in Vietnam, and also the impact of fragile environmental/agricultural production on developing nations. All in all a very interesting read. In looking at my particular interest of educational development, I want to specifically focus on a few sections of the book. The first concerns the randomized trials that have become the norm in the health field, when conducting field trials for new medicines before they can be approved by the FDA. The implementation of these randomized trials into all realms of development will be a crucial measure of success moving forward:

“There isn’t any conceptual reason why economists cant harness the power of randomization, by picking villagers-or even entire villages-to receive an economic treatment, and compare these changes to control villages. Armed with these ideas, we hope economists can generate similar breakthroughs in tackling the challenges of global poverty...In collaboration with NGO's, and the MIT Poverty Action Lab, the academic researchers working in Busia (Kenya) have already used randomized evaluations to show that providing anti-parasitic drugs for intestinal worms-a major scourge affecting over 90 percent of Busia's kids-can boost children's school attendance and may have longer term effects on students health...Information on failures is just as useful as successes, since it allows policymakers to shift funding away from the projects that don’t work and towards expanding those that do...

In Busia, for every success there has been two or three development projects that didn't have any meaningful impacts. For example, given the scarcity of textbooks in Busia's schools, it seemed natural to expect that providing more books would produce better student test scores. (However, the successes of literacy and book campaigns need to be measured with more metrics than only standardized test scores, which can be a poor indicator, and can themselves be plagued with problems). It turns out though, that students in classrooms randomly assigned to receive extra books didnt do any better on average than their counterparts in control schools. Maybe other educational expenditures like higher teacher salaries would be more effective, or maybe Kenyan school textbooks just arent any good. Paul Glewwe and coauthors find that standard school texts are written at too high a level of difficulty for most rural Kenyan students, probably because they were written to cater to the needs of the high-achieving children of the country's Nairobi elite. Whatever the reason, we've learned that resources need to be redirected away from programs such like these that, however well-intentioned, don't have any impact.”