Fighting Poverty One Experiment at a Time: A Review of Abhijit Banerjee and

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of pov erty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by social experiments and field observations. Their preferred policies entail small reforms at the margin, also informed by experiments—specifically randomized control trials. While the book provides some interesting insights, I question how far its approach will get us infighting global poverty. (JEL 132,138, 015, P36)

[1]  Un Millennium,et al.  Investing in development : a practical plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals , 2005 .

[2]  D. McKenzie,et al.  Do Entry Costs Provide an Empirical Basis for Poverty Traps? Evidence from Mexican Microenterprises , 2006, Economic Development and Cultural Change.

[3]  James J. Heckman,et al.  Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation , 1991 .

[4]  Aart Kraay,et al.  Poverty Traps, Aid, and Growth , 2005 .

[5]  Peter D. Little,et al.  Poverty Traps and Natural Disasters in Ethiopia and Honduras , 2007 .

[6]  Shaohua Chen,et al.  Are there lasting impacts of aid to poor areas , 2009 .

[7]  J. Heckman,et al.  Econometric Evaluation of Social Programs, Part III: Distributional Treatment Effects, Dynamic Treatment Effects, Dynamic Discrete Choice, and General Equilibrium Policy Evaluation , 2007 .

[8]  C. Barrett,et al.  The Power and Pitfalls of Experiments in Development Economics: Some Non‐random Reflections , 2010 .

[9]  Robert A. Moffitt,et al.  The Role of Randomized Field Trials in Social Science Research , 2002 .

[10]  Sarah Baird,et al.  Cash or Condition? Evidence from a Cash Transfer Experiment , 2010 .

[11]  M. Woolcock,et al.  Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia , 2011 .

[12]  David J. McKenzie,et al.  Poverty traps and nonlinear income dynamics with measurement error and individual heterogeneity , 2005 .

[13]  M. Ravallion.  Evaluation in the Practice of Development , 2008 .

[14]  Jishnu Das.  Improving immunisation coverage in rural India , 2010, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[15]  M. Lokshin,et al.  Household Income Dynamics in Two Transition Economies , 2004 .

[16]  A McMahon,et al.  Evaluation in practice. , 1993, British journal of nursing.

[17]  M. Keane.  Structural vs. atheoretic approaches to econometrics , 2010 .

[18]  Angus Deaton.  Instruments, Randomization, and Learning about Development , 2010 .

[19]  James J. Heckman,et al.  Assessing the Case for Social Experiments , 1995 .

[20]  A. Banerjee,et al.  Making Aid Work , 2007 .

[21]  James J Heckman,et al.  Understanding Instrumental Variables in Models with Essential Heterogeneity , 2006, The Review of Economics and Statistics.