The urgency of reducing poverty in the developing world has been
the subject of a public campaign by such unlikely policy experts as
George Clooney, Alicia Keyes, Elton John, Angelina Jolie, and Bono.
And yet accompanying the call for more foreign aid is an almost
universal discontent with the effectiveness of the existing aid
system. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, development expert William
Easterly has gathered top scholars in the field to discuss how to
improve foreign aid. These authors, Easterly points out, are not
claiming that their ideas will (to invoke a current slogan) Make
Poverty History. Rather, they take on specific problems and propose
some hard-headed solutions. Easterly himself, in an expansive and
impassioned introductory chapter, makes a case for the
"searchers"--who explore solutions by trial and error and learn
from feedback--over the "planners"--who throw an endless supply of
resources at a big goal--as the most likely to reduce poverty.
Other writers look at scientific evaluation of aid projects
(including randomized trials) and describe projects found to be
cost-effective, including vaccine delivery and HIV education;
consider how to deal with the government of the recipient state
(work through it or bypass a possibly dysfunctional government?);
examine the roles of the International Monetary Fund (a de-facto
aid provider) and the World Bank; and analyze some new and
innovative proposals for distributing aid. William Easterly is the
author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and
Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001) and The White Man's
Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much
Ill and So Little Good. He is Professor of Economics at New York
University (Joint with Africa House), Codirector of NYU's
Development Research Institute, visiting Fellow at the Brookings
Institution, and Nonresident Fellow of the Center for Global
Development in Washington, DC. Contributors Abhijit Banerjee, Nancy
Birdsall, Craig Burnside, Esther Duflo, Domenico Fanizza, William
Easterly, Ruimin He, Kurt Hoffman, Stephen Knack, Michael Kremer,
Mari Kuraishi, Ruth Levine, Bertin Martens, John McMillan, Edward
Miguel, Jonathan Morduch, Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson, Lant
Pritchett, Steven Radelet, Aminur Rahman, Ritva Reinikka, Jakob
Svensson, Nicolas van de Walle, James Vreeland, Dennis Whittle,
Michael Woolcock
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