Growth, income, poverty and the Nobel

There is good reason for caution in applying the results of randomised control trials across space and time

The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics has been jointly awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, for “their experimental work, involving controlled randomised trials.... (which) has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research”.

The focus of their work is on modest, low-cost interventions, derived from experimental field research that demonstrate what interventions work, and what do not. Whether free distribution of lentils significantly improves attendance at child immunisation clinics, or whether the incidence of malaria declines more when