Op-Ed: How foreign aid for medicine yields big economic returns
Edward Miguel
Los Angeles Times
President Biden’s decision to donate 500 million COVID-19 vaccines to other countries by June 2022 is an important step toward restoring the United States’ global standing. Another, parallel foreign policy solution could perhaps do even more. It is simple, cost-effective and could improve the health and well-being of billions of people — especially children. Inexpensive treatments — …
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Money or power? Choosing COVID-19 aid in Kenya
Edward Miguel, Kenneth Lee, Oliver Kim, Eric Hsu, Susanna Berkouwer
The IGC Blog
Participants in an experiment comparing demand for cash transfers and electricity subsidies in urban Kenya, overwhelmingly prefer cash given the proliferation of mobile money via platforms like M-PESA and preference for short-term liquidity. Conversely, in rural Kenya, slightly more respondents opted for electricity token transfers given that they face saving constraints with the concern that …
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The Disastrous Neglect of Neglected Tropical Diseases
Edward Miguel, Michael Kremer
Project Syndicate
With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more of the world’s population into poverty and increasing the risk of debilitating illness, now is the time to redouble our efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases. And yet, increasing demands on government budgets seem poised to halt – and even reverse – hard-won progress. US President Joe Biden’s …
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Pre-results Review at the Journal of Development Economics: Lessons learned so far
Andrew Foster, Dean Karlan, Edward Miguel, Aleksandar Bogdanoski
World Bank Development Impact Blog
In March 2018, the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) began piloting Pre-results Review track (also referred to as “registered reports” in other disciplines) in collaboration with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Through this track, the JDE reviewed and accepted detailed proposals for prospective empirical projects before results were available, offering …
Agricultural productivity and rural-urban wage gaps revisited: Lessons from panel data
Edward Miguel, Joan Hicks, Marieke Kleemans, Nicholas Li
VoxDev
Rich countries are industrial, poor countries are agricultural This simple observation intrigued early scholars, and prompted the conclusion that the key to economic development is the transition of economies out of agriculture and into ‘modern’ sectors. More recently, the question of whether there is ‘too much’ labour in agriculture in poor countries has seen renewed …
Does Solving Energy Poverty Help Solve Poverty? Not Quite
Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, Catherine Wolfram
Energy Institute Blog
The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …
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Does Providing Electricity to the Poor Reduce Poverty? Research Suggests Not Quite
Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, Catherine Wolfram
Forbes
The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …
The legacy of war on social and political behaviour
Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilová, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, Tamar Mitts
VoxEU
Nearly half of all nations in the world have experienced some form of external or internal armed conflict in the past half century. Many international development researchers and policymakers describe war as “development in reverse” (Collier et al. 2003), having persistent adverse effects on all factors relevant for development – physical, human, and social capital. …
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Measuring ethnic preferences: New experimental evidence
Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Simon Galle, Edward Miguel, Daniel N. Posner, Bertil Tungodden, Kelly Zhang
VoxEU
Ethnic divisions have been shown to adversely affect economic performance and political stability, especially in Africa (Easterly and Levine 1997, Cederman et al. 2007 and 2011). The underlying mechanisms that have played a particularly central role in theory, and that are at the root of conventional wisdom about why ethnicity matters, are that individuals exhibit …
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Despite $7 billion to ‘Power Africa’, why the continent is still in the dark
Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel
Reuters
When President Barack Obama made his first presidential visit to Kenya over the weekend, he visited not just his ancestral home, but one of the target countries in his $7 billion signature foreign aid initiative, Power Africa. Launched in 2013, Power Africa aims to boost electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative has prioritized expanding …
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The scientific case for deworming children
Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel
Thomson Reuters Foundation
The last few days have seen an outpouring of news stories relating to “worm wars”, the policy debate over whether governments should provide mass treatment for intestinal worm infections in endemic areas. This was sparked when a re-analysis of a 2004 study (which found a strong link between deworming and school attendance) was published last …
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Weather and Violence
Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang, Edward Miguel
New York Times
As temperatures rise, tempers flare. Anyone who has experienced the hostility of a swelteringly hot summer day in the city can attest to that. But researchers are now quantifying the causal relationship between extreme climate and human conflict. Whether their focus is on small-scale interpersonal aggression or large-scale political instability, low-income or high-income societies, the …