Making Aid Work - Softcover

Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak

3.88

42 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262534118 ISBN 13: 9780262534116

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2017

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An encouraging account of the potential of foreign aid to reduce poverty and a challenge to all aid organizations to think harder about how they spend their money. With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global poverty is our greatest moral challenge. The large and pressing practical question is how best to address that challenge. Although millions of dollars flow to poor countries, the results are often disappointing. In Making Aid Work, Abhijit Banerjee-an "aid optimist"-argues that aid has much to contribute, but the lack of analysis about which programs really work causes considerable waste and inefficiency, which in turn fuels unwarranted pessimism about the role of aid in fostering economic development. Banerjee challenges aid donors to do better. Building on the model used to evaluate new drugs before they come on the market, he argues that donors should assess programs with field experiments using randomized trials. In fact, he writes, given the number of such experiments already undertaken, current levels of development assistance could focus entirely on programs with proven records of success in experimental conditions. Responding to his challenge, leaders in the field-including Nicholas Stern, Raymond Offenheiser, Alice Amsden, Ruth Levine, Angus Deaton, and others-question whether randomized trials are the most appropriate way to evaluate success for all programs. They raise broader questions as well, about the importance of aid for economic development and about the kinds of interventions (micro or macro, political or economic) that will lead to real improvements in the lives of poor people around the world. With one in every six people now living in extreme poverty, getting it right is crucial.

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Review:

By way of contrast, Making Aid Work is a short book, consisting of a series of contributions be different academics and practitioners. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an aid optimist, who thinks aid can be made to work. However, what is needed is an improvement in the method of giving aid. Banerjee blames "institutional laziness" - aid institutions fail to make the effort to find out what forms of aid work before they give it. Banejee's solution is to borrow from medical research the practice of carrying out randomised trials before giving aid and fund only projects that are proven to work. Choosing the right option can matter a great deal in ensuring that scarce aid money is not wasted on expensive, ineffectual projects ...Essential reading for anyone interested in the subject of aid and wishing to be informed about the issues involved. At a time when politicians are being urged to match actions with words by increasing levels of aid giving, it is vitally important that we stand back and ask how we can make the funds currently available achieve much better results. Making aid more effective matters just as much as giving more. -- Times Higher Educational Supplement 27.7.07 (Nigel Grimwade)

About the Author:

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the department of economics at MIT, a director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and a past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). Alice H. Amsden was Barton T. Weller Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jagdish N. Bhagwati is University Professor of Economics, Law, and International Relations at Columbia University and former Adviser to the Director General of GATT, Arthur Dunkel. He is the author (with Arvind Panagariya) of Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries. Lord Stern is I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, past President of the British Academy, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, and former Chief Economist at the World Bank. He was the lead author of the influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the findings of which he adapted in his book for general readers, The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity (also known as A Blueprint for a Safer Planet).

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