Reinventing Foreign Aid by William R Easterly

Reinventing Foreign Aid by William R Easterly

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.

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

The Elusive Search for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001) and The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Attempts to Help the Rest Have Done So Much Harm and So Little Good are two books written by William Easterly. He is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He is a professor of economics at New York University (in collaboration with Africa House), codirector of NYU's Development Research Institute, and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. The Elusive Search for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001) and The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Attempts to Help the Rest Have Done So Much Harm and So Little Good are two books written by William Easterly. He is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He is a professor of economics at New York University (in collaboration with Africa House), codirector of NYU's Development Research Institute, and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is a director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT and a past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). He is a Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the department of economics at MIT.

Michael works as a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Michael works as a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Edward Miguel is an Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Center of Evalulations for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Countries with Raymond Fisman. Jonathan Morduch is a professor of public policy and economics at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

He is the coauthor of Microfinance Economics (MIT Press) and Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Survive on $2 a Day. Michael works as a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.