Fighting poverty, from the laboratory

Development economics, it’s just theory without a scientific basis? Not for Esther Duflo, of course. This economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believes that by using random testing, similar to those utilized by the pharmaceutical industry, lies the key to create effective measures which determine the success of the aid programs.

Money, obviously, is important to fight against poverty. But it’s not the only thing. To Duflo’s view, the most important is to know what (and why) works and doesn’t work in the implementation of aid programs to make them the most effective possible. “In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy?” – says Duflo in a speech organized by the MIT.

Since 2003, through the Poverty Action Lab, Duflo and her team has gathered real data in order to find answers to alleviate poverty. From this data, they have got really interesting results. For example, the efficiency of public benefits depends on the gender of its recipient; or that the acceleration of the rate of human capital is not matched with economic growth. Another research that has generated quite a lot controversy has been the measure of the ‘microcredit’ programme effectiveness, which is not really effective because only one out of eight people use a ‘microcredit’ to set a business that wouldn’t exist in any other way.

Social experiments to fight poverty

Using a ‘micro’ approach, Esther Duflo has made plenty of social experiments to fight poverty. In a MIT speech, the economist gives three examples to get an impression of her work:

Immunization. In spite of the existence of vaccination programmes that offer vaccines for free, there are yet at least 25 million children who do not get the immunization they should. This is not due to a lack of vaccines or because parents don’t care about their children, there are other determining factors that must be considered like, for instance, the distance of the vaccination centres or the survival chores that poor people have to face day by day. These factors make parents to postpone their children’s vaccination until it is too late. After carrying out several experiments of random selection, it was found that which made the best measure to get an increment in the vaccination rate was a simple kilogram of lentils, offered as a gift in response of going to a vaccination centre. Something so cheap could increase the initial vaccination rate by six times.

Malaria. To fight malaria, there are lots of programmes which distribute bed nets for free. Having realised that there were people who didn’t value this prevention measure (maybe just because it was for free) and they use them as fishing nets instead. Duflo’s team wondered until what extend it was the best to give bed nets for free. It was also important to know if people would buy them in the future in case they were no more for free. Should they be for free, then? After doing some experiments, they came to the conclusion that this ‘alternative’ uses were made by a minority and that the distribution of bed nets for free, in spite of decreasing, guaranties a greater rate of purchase in the long term.

Education. How to get children into schools? In Duflo’s words, education intervention can be applied in many different ways, for example hiring teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships... but, what is the intervention which makes the best result? It was proved that by telling people the benefits of education, something really cheap, it was achieved the biggest schooling rate increase. Another finding less intuitive was the relation between worms and school attendance: intestinal worms make a considerable amount of children weaker and, as a result, they didn’t attend to school. By curing these children, the attendance was incremented considerably.

Thanks to her research, Ester Duflo is becoming one of economist more important in the field of development economics. Her name has been mentioned since 2009, when she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a 'genius' grant. In 2010, Duflo was awarder with a John Bates Clark medal, which is considered a reliable indicator of future Nobel consideration.