Randomized control trials (RCTs) have been grabbing a lot of headlines lately. Esther Duflo, the principal champion of RCTs and recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, recently had a profile in The New Yorker (gated) and also gave an entertaining TED Talk.
A couple weeks ago, a series of debates, spurred by Paul Krugman, centered on the dynamism of the transatlantic economy.
Yesterday I attended an excellent presentation by John Fingleton, Chief Executive of the UK office of Fair Trading. He discussed his recent paper: “Government in markets – why competition matters – a guide for policy makers".
Editor's note: Dorsati Madani is a Senior Economist at the World Bank's Strategy and Analysis Unit (CICSA) of the Investment Climate Advisory
Yesterday I discussed the launch of the latest Doing Business sub-report, which focuses on the ease of paying taxes. This is a laudable effort- paying taxes is painful enough to begin with, why make it more difficult than necessary?
Editor's note: Augusto de la Torre is chief economist, and Alain Ize a consultant, in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank. This is the 10th in a series of policy briefs on the crisis—assessing the policy responses, shedding light on financial reforms currently under debate, and providing insights for emerging-market policy makers.
The latest publication of the Doing Business franchise is out: Paying Taxes 2010-The global picture.
The study measures tax systems from the point of view of a domestic company complying with the different tax laws and regulations in each economy. The case study company is a small to medium-size manufacturer and retailer, deliberately chosen to ensure that its business can be identified with and compared worldwide.
Bill Easterly has a very nice post summarizing many of the concerns around randomized control trials (RCTs).
Last month I wrote about the underwhelming results of a randomized control trial of microcredit in India. The long and short of it: access to credit helped increase business investment, but didn't have any noticeable effect on the things we really care about, like health and education. While it would perhaps be unfair to say that the study was a final verdict on microfinance, it was clearly a serious indictment.
Michael Trucano of the World Bank's EduTech blog has posted a valuable round-up of various evaluations of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) pilots around the world. Michael warns that many of the evaluations are of short-term and small-scale pilots, which limits our ability to extrapolate.
