- The latest Journal of Economic Perspectives has two papers on the role of the World Bank: Clemens and Kremer on its role in facilitating international agreements to reduce poverty; and Ravallion on the role as a knowledge bank. Clemens and Kremer have a nice list of policy areas where developing countries have dramatically changed policies following World Bank involvement and conclude that “While it is impossible to quantify the Bank’s policy influence in a precise way, our judgment is that Bank donors are getting a tremendous amount of policy influence with their limited funding. This influence comes both through deals that link Bank finance to policy reform and through the Bank’s soft power. For this reason, allocating more resources to the Bank would be desirable.”
- The JEP also has a nice summary by Larry Katz of Roland Fryer’s work.
- The wonkblog on how much evidence there is (or is not) behind nutrition guidelines, and how evidence interacts with public policy demands – and of the difficulties of using RCTs in this context but also the dangers of veering towards nutritional nihilism
- Finally, if you wonder why your emails don’t get replied to, here is PhD comics
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