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This guest post is provided by Milford Bateman who is a Visiting Professor of Economics at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula in Croatia and a development consultant. He recently accepted a two-month position as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Development Studies at St Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada, to be taken up in late 2013.
Four of the most high-profile research teams have in recent months released papers summarising the results of multi-year projects that aimed to assess the impact of microcredit. All of these projects claim to have found some small residual value in the increasingly de-bunked concept of microcredit which, the authors quickly go on to say, suggests to them that it is too early to agree with the growing number of nay-sayers and abandon the microcredit model in favour of other local development models. The four papers I refer to are:
- (most recently) ‘Win Some Lose Some? Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment by Compartamos Banco’ by Manuela Angelucci, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman (hereafter AKZ
- ‘Microfinance at the Margin: Experimental Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina’ by Britta Augsburg, Ralph De Haas, Heike Harmgart and Costas Meghir (hereafter AHHM)
- ‘The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation’ by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Rachel Glennerster and Cynthia G. Kinnan (hereafter DBGK)
- ‘Are microcredit participants in Bangladesh trapped in poverty and debt?’ by Shahidur R. Khandker and Hussain A. Samad (hereafter KS).
Dazzling econometrics and pioneering impact methodologies aside, the most important thing these four papers all have in common is actually something else: they all go to great lengths to avoid exploring the most awkward downside issues that lie at the heart of microcredit and, to do so, they choose to deploy some faulty logic along the way. Read the rest of this entry »
Historically, infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have been at the center of global health initiatives, as they easily spread across national borders and threatened the lives of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries with under-developed health care systems. Yet as the world celebrates its progress on the reduction of infectious diseases, the globalisation of unhealthy lifestyles, rapid and unplanned urbanisation, and liberal market forces have propelled a possibly greater threat to the health and development of the Global South, organisations like the World Health Organisation (WHO) fear. This threat is often referred to as “the invisible epidemic” of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), yet strategies on how to overcome them still remain unclear.
Causes and effects of non-communicable diseases
Source: World Health Organization
This blog entry is the first in a series of contributions exploring the rise of NCDs as a major health and development issue in low- and middle-income countries. The aim is to present and discuss evidence of the leading actors who are increasingly seeing NCDs not only as a challenge for developing countries, but also as an issue of transnational health governance that cannot be resolved at the national level alone. Read the rest of this entry »
governancexborders.com 