Crowd sourcing event news in real time

When television first appeared it revolutionised news - now people could see events, sometimes live, for themselves, albeit on the small screen. Then came CNN - 24 hours news that also changed the 'news cycle' and the way people consume information. More recently the ubiquitous cell phone video/camera and YouTube has further decentralised news provision. And now, perhaps the ultimate extension of this trend, a number of websites provide real-time crowd sourced information about events unfolding on the ground, with no intermediary (here is an example from ID PhD student Mareike Schomerus today - Jan 30 - on crowd sourced news on demonstrations in Khartoum Sudan). From an econometricians' perspective the possibilities seem endless - what kinds of hypotheses would you test with time and location data on the individual actions that make up mass events?

The Institutionalization of Rigorous Impact Evaluations

Here are interesting updates that reflect the spread of rigorous policy evaluation at all levels: the government, aid agencies, intergovernmental bodies, NGOs...
Thanks Renita for sharing the link!

Just So Stories and Hanging Mechanisms

A pet peeve of mine, which you may have heard me mention once or twice (!), is the prevalence (hopefully not from DV409 though!) of 'just so stories.' Our insistence that for each stated relationship you also have an actual mechanism in mind is related to this (hence my other term for this practice - the 'hanging mechanism' in reference to 'hanging chads' from the infamous Bush election). Stephen Jay Gould has been on a campaign against Just So Stories in his own field for some time. If you just remove the biological references and replace them with development references, the description should sound familiar:

• "Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that records anatomy and ecology and then tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived here. These speculations have been charitably called "scenarios"; they are often more contemptuously, and rightly, labeled "stories" (or "just-so stories" if they rely on the fallacious assumption that everything exists for a purpose).

Here is another blog spot on the topic. Although these writers are referring to biology, not economics or development, it is an excellent analytical and critical thinking exercise to try to spot the Just So Stories and hanging mechanisms that abound around International Development...

The Davos Health Effect

(Re-post from last year)


This is perhaps one of the most important pledges coming out of Davos lastyear. http://ibnlive.in.com/news/bill-gates-promises-10-billion-for-vaccines/109406-17.html

This poses an interesting question about markets and how they work to develop public goods like vaccines. For years, pharmaceuticals have had the capacity to develop vaccines that would have prevented millions of deaths in the developing world. So why hasn't this happened?

Pharmaceuticals had little incentive to develop these vaccines as they would be serving a low-income segment of the market that would not be able to afford high-priced preventive care.

This is one area in which the work of economists has been highly influential in policy circles...

Michael Kremer from Harvard University has advocated for years that we need to intervene in this market to align the incentives of pharmaceuticals (profit), with those of policy-makers and donors (promoting well-being in the developing world). Michael has suggested that donors pledge to guarantee the demand for vaccines aimed at "developing country diseases", to create incentives for the pharmaceuticals to develop them. You can check out his work here:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kremer/files/AMCHealthEconomicsFinal.pdf

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kremer/files/innovationsFinal.pdf

http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol3/iss3/art1/

Mis-targeting Efforts in the War on AIDS

(Re-post from last year but relevant to this week's discussion!)

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports a gloomy view on the war on AIDS. War on AIDS

Several of the arguments used seem straightforward in hindsight: there was way too much emphasis on treatment and very little on prevention. With scarce resources (this includes "celebrity capital" to champion a cause), even if the expansion of treatment manages to slow down growth in prevalence rates, it is not surprising that many poor countries are incapable of providing treatment to all those infected. As treatment expansion rates are lower than the rates of new infections, most countries are now in a difficult position of having to ration life-saving treatments.

Earlier in the term we discussed the political economy of global health policies and how this can distort the allocation of resources both between diseases (eg: malaria, AIDS, diarrhea) and between preventive and curative approaches.

Why has it been so difficult to allocate resources to preventive care in HIV-AIDS in order to address the real source of the problem?

Bribing as a development strategy?

In preparation for this week's class on education, here is the latest data on an alternative strategy to boost demand for education. The heterogeneity in results identified by both studies highlights the importance of replication guided by sensible theoretical priors on how different parameters may affect the impact of the policy...

What is in a number

Following our class discussion about how to come up with an index for poverty, here is an even harder nut to crack. Even if we knew what to measure and how to measure it, we would still be constrained by the politics!