World Bank Challenged: Are the Poor Really Helped?

[papau]

Will modest, pr oven gains for the poor lose out to inflated, unproven claims for tax cuts to the rich or a new weapons system, simply because while we should logically demand that we subject the full range of government spending to the discipline of solid, scientific, and randomized evaluations, the reality is that we only talk of doing what is logical when it comes to social programs?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/28/international/28lett.html?pagewanted=print&position=

World Bank Challenged: Are the Poor Really Helped?
By CELIA DUGGER

WASHINGTON - Wealthy nations and international organizations, including the World Bank, spend more than $55 billion annually to better the lot of the world's 2.7 billion poor people. Yet they have scant evidence that the myriad projects they finance have made any real difference, many economists say.

That important fact has left some critics of the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, dissatisfied, and they have begun throwing down an essential challenge. It is not enough, they say, just to measure how many miles of roads are built, schools constructed or microcredit loans provided. You must also measure whether those investments actually help poor people live longer, more prosperous lives.

It is a common-sense approach that is harder than it sounds, just like the question it seeks to answer: Does aid really work?

A small band of development economists, who a year ago founded the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have become influential advocates for randomized evaluations as the best way to answer that question. Such trials, generally regarded as the gold standard in social policy research, involve randomly assigning people eligible for an antipoverty program to get the help or not, then comparing outcomes to see whether those who got the help fared better than those who did not.<snip>

(Adding an extra teacher to classrooms in rural India did not improve children's test scores, but hiring high-school graduates who were paid only $10 to $15 a month to give remedial tutoring to groups of lagging students in a Bombay slum markedly improved reading and math skills.....in Kenya providing poor students with free uniforms or a simple porridge breakfast substantially increased attendance, but giving them drugs to treat the intestinal worms that infect more than a quarter of the world's population was more cost effective, with a price tag of only $3.50 for each extra year of schooling achieved - Healthier children are more likely to go to school.....Mexican program that paid poor mothers a small sum if they kept their children in school and got them immunized spreads because a large measure because a large randomized trial, published in 2001, showed that the children who participated were healthier and stayed in school longer).

[Kali]

1. Not sure if this topic is still going

but i had bookmarked it and sent the article to a friend who does work in conjunction with World Bank. Here is the first reaction to the article:

"Oooh; good! Very good! I'm still infuriated by my last "official" evaluation by a blue-ribbon World Bank team, an absurd farce well on the wrong side of criminal incompetence. Briefly, fouteen days of field time were planned for these four jokers; they actually spent a day and a half total, to evaluate the effectiveness of the program in three of the seven countries in the program. (Lessee-- that's a half day per country, less travel time, plus time needed to check into the best hotel in each capital, plus rest time.....) I won't bother with details, but altogether somewhere in the vicinity of $200,000 was wasted on that crap. Go get 'em, Bannerjee!"

[Mika]

2. World Bank Senior Vice President Admits HIPC Conditions Wrong

http://www.economicjustice.org/resources/media/stiglitzHIPC.html