· VoxDev interviews Rafe Meager on aggregating evidence. “There’s just very little serious attempt to deal with noise. People do these power calculations that are mostly, to be honest, made up or kind of reverse engineered.”…” Rafe worries about ‘cookie cutter’ approaches that apply meta-analytic recipes without care – more methodological progress is required for these aggregation methods.”
· On the CGD blog, an important post making the point once again that standard deviations are usually a terrible way of comparing effect sizes. “In low-literacy settings, many children score zero on reading assessments. When most children are clustered at zero, the spread of scores is tiny. That means each extra word read per minute “buys” a much larger effect size. Across 66 observations, we find that the same gain, one additional correct word per minute, corresponds to anywhere from 0.03 to 0.55 standard deviations…Put differently, the apparent value of one extra word per minute varies almost 20-fold across studies.” A point made in 2015 on our blog by me and then Abhijeet Singh – but one that needs reiterating again and again.
· Also on the CGD blog, Dave Evans on what he learned from a 500+ page handbook on child poverty and inequality “Children are disproportionately represented among the poor: children under the age of 18 make up less than a third of the world population but more than 50 percent of those in extreme poverty…What do we mean by child poverty, and how should we measure it? This topic receives the lion’s share of space in the handbook for the good reason that it is deeply complicated.”
· Dan Banik talks with Pritish Behuria on “is Rwanda really a development success?”, with discussion around structural transformation, whether services-led development can work, and the difficulty of sustained rapid growth “across more than six decades of development effort, only thirteen economies have ever sustained the kind of growth that genuinely reshapes a country — seven per cent a year for twenty-five years. Rwanda, he writes, is “the closest thing to a new entry” and still did not cross the line.”
· Aaditya Mattoo, Anna Tompsett, and Eddy Zou are working on a project about complementarity that asks whether and when development interventions work better together than separately. Their project combines a review of existing evidence with an expert survey and observational data about policymaker choices. They'd be super grateful if you'd take 10 minutes to share your views via the survey
· In Development magazine has a call for pitches – “In Development is a magazine dedicated to exploring how progress actually happens in the developing world. We publish narrative-driven essays on ideas, policies, and technologies that have the possibility to, or are already, improving global well-being…. We’re especially interested in: Unexpected success stories: projects, entrepreneurs, or policies driving real change; Comparative or historical insights: what can we learn from how different countries tackled similar challenges?; Technological innovation: how will AI affect developing countries?; Institutional and policy experiments: from land titling to regulatory reform.”
· NEUDC will be November 7-8 at Cornell this year, with submissions open June 15, and closing August 9.
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