Pockets of California amid sub-Saharan Africa?
Rant and rave alert. As an undergrad at Yale I took several classes in which professors, TAs and fellow students would casually say things that insinuated that all of Africa (read sub-Saharan Africa)...
View ArticleDevelopment Experts and Their Biases
It is perhaps uncontroversial to suggest that World Bank staff have a different worldview from others. World Bank staff are highly educated and relatively wealthier than a large proportion of the...
View ArticleA Kansas City High Schooler’s Development Questions
I regularly receive emails from readers with all sorts of questions and requests. This one caught my eye: Hello Dr. Opalo, My name is [redacted] and I am a senior in high school in Kansas City, MO. I...
View ArticleIntrahousehold Inequality Across Income Levels: Evidence From Nutrition Data
Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using...
View ArticleCash and Markets in Development
This is from a story in Kenya’s Standard Newspaper: Martin Wepukhulu is a small-holder farmer in Trans Nzoia County, popularly described as Kenya’s breadbasket. To produce a two-kilogramme tin of maize...
View ArticleIs the government of Rwanda massaging statistics on growth and poverty...
This is from the latest installment in the debate over whether Rwanda’s official statistics on economic growth and poverty reduction can be believed: All poverty lines yield similar trends when used...
View ArticleThere appears to be no systematic relationship between genetic diversity and...
This is from Caraher and Ash: We replicate Ashraf and Galor (2013) and find that its conclusions concerning the association between human genetic diversity and economic development depend substantially...
View ArticleThe Economics of Weddings in Nigeria
This piece highlights some interesting facts about the wedding industry in Nigeria. How much do weddings cost? When an upper-class Nigerian couple throws a wedding, at least 1,000 guests are invited....
View ArticlePeople Are Brains, Not Stomachs
Alex Tabarrok over at MR has a fantastic summary of some of the works of this year’s three Nobel Prize winners in Economics. This paragraph on one of Michael Kremer’s papers stood out to me: My second...
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Why has economic growth reduced poverty in some African states but failed in...
This is from an excellent paper by Rumman Khan, Oliver Morrissey and Paul Mosley: Between 1990 and 2012, for most of the developing world, poverty has halved or more than halved except in sub-Saharan...
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