Over the past two centuries, the world has grown much richer and has seen the health of its population improve dramatically. However, as the Economics Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton reminds us, this historical break must not conceal the great inequalities in access to development between countries.
The Gezi park uprising of June 2013 emerged in protest against a planned urban development project proposed by the Turkish government as part of its wider policy of attempting to revive the country’s glorious Ottoman past, despite the fact that Turkey is now a modern republic. J-F. Pérouse takes a look at the country’s ambitious urban transformation.
Randomized evaluation has become very fashionable. Initially developed in the field of development economics, it has now spread to many public policy areas. Yannick L’Horty and Pascale Petit here discuss the advantages and the limits of this relatively recent tool for evaluating social policies.
Education, microcredit, health policy…. How can we really measure the effectiveness of a public policy? Esther Duflo talks about the principles of the experimental method she has developed and perfected in several situations around the world.
Although agricultural protectionism is a major obstacle to development in some Southern countries, it cannot be blamed for the food crisis of 2007-2008. Growing trade liberalisation in the agricultural sector had an ambiguous effect: it facilitated the development of countries with a comparative advantage in the sector, but it also led to a rise in agricultural prices and therefore harmed developing countries that are net importers of food products.
Trade liberalization seems to have increased growth and income in developing countries over the past thirty years, through lower prices, firm-level efficiency gains and improved access to foreign inputs. However, aggregate gains from free trade are not necessarily equally distributed, so that trade liberalization has important costs for some people.
