Randomized Trials in Development Economics

The Economist has an interesting article this week about the debate going on among practitioners of development evaluation over the importance of “randomised evaluations” in which different policies — to boost school attendance, say — are tested by randomly assigning them to different groups. There seems to be agreement that randomized evaluations are useful for the study of the effectiveness of specific interventions, but that they do not help much with the study of macro economic policies nor of institution building efforts. Indeed, there are many problems of finding representative situations in which to conduct such trials which are such that the results may be expected to predict the utility of the innovations when scaled up to a national or regional scale. The article sites a recent Brookings Institute meeting.

The Brookings Institute seminar titled "What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small".