《Poor Economics》《贫穷的本质》英文版 -pdf、txt、mobi、kindle、epub电子版下载

内容简介

Winner of the 2011 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award

Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.

This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.

Learn more at www.pooreconomics.com

作者简介

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including most recently the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the Government of India.

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She is a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award (2009) and the John Bates Clark medal awarded annually to the best American economist under forty (2012). In 2003, Banerjee and Duflo cofounded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which they continue to direct.

目录

Foreword vii
1 Think Again, Again 1
Part I Private Lives
2 A Billion Hungry People? 19
3 Low-Hanging Fruit for Better (Global) Health? 41
4 Top of the Class 71
5 PakSudarno’s Big Family 103
Part II Institutions
6 Barefoot Hedge-Fund Managers 133
7 The Men from Kabul and the Eunuchs of India: The (Not So) Simple Economics of Lending to the Poor 157
8 Saving Brick by Brick 183
9 Reluctant Entrepreneurs 205
10 Policies, Politics 235
In Place of a Sweeping Conclusion 267
Acknowledgments 275
Notes 277
Index 295

试读

Think Again, Again

Every year, 9 million children die before their fifth birthday.1 A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a one-in-thirty chance of dying while giving birth—in the developed world, the chance is one in 5,600. There are at least twenty-five countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average person is expected to live no more than fifty-five years. In India alone, more than 50 million school-going children cannot read a very simple text.2

This is the kind of paragraph that might make you want to shut this book and, ideally, forget about this whole business of world poverty: The problem seems too big, too intractable. Our goal with this book is to persuade you not to.

A recent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania illustrates well how easily we can feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem.3 Researchers gave students $5 to fill out a short survey. They then showed them a flyer and asked them to make a donation to Save the Children, one of the world’s leading charities. There were two different flyers. Some (randomly selected) students were shown this:

Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children; In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42% drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated 3 million Zambians face hunger; Four million Angolans—one third of the population—have been forced to flee their homes; More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.

Other students were shown a flyer featuring a picture of a young girl and these words:

Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa, is desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed her, provide her with education, as well as basic medical care and hygiene education.

The first flyer raised an average of $1.16 from each student. The second flyer, in which the plight of millions became the plight of one, raised $2.83. The students, it seems, were willing to take some responsibility for helping Rokia, but when faced with the scale of the global problem, they felt discouraged.

Some other students, also chosen at random, were shown the same two flyers after being told that people are more likely to donate money to an identifiable victim than when presented with general information. Those shown the first flyer, for Zambia, Angola, and Mali, gave more or less what that flyer had raised without the warning—$1.26. Those shown the second flyer, for Rokia, after this warning gave only $1.36, less than half of what their colleagues had committed without it. Encouraging students to think again prompted them to be less generous to Rokia, but not more generous to everyone else in Mali.

The students’ reaction is typical of how most of us feel when we are confronted with problems like poverty. Our first instinct is to be generous, especially when facing an imperiled seven-year-old girl. But, like the Penn students, our second thought is often that there is really no point: Our contribution would be a drop in the bucket, and the bucket probably leaks. This book is an invitation to think again, again: to turn away from the feeling that the fight against poverty is too overwhelming, and to start to think of the challenge as a set of concrete problems that, once properly identified and understood, can be solved one at a time.

Unfortunately, this is not how the debates on poverty are usually framed. Instead of discussing how best to fight diarrhea or dengue, many of the most vocal experts tend to be fixated on the “big questions”: What is the ultimate cause of poverty? How much faith should we place in free markets? Is democracy good for the poor? Does foreign aid have a role to play? And so on.

Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to the United Nations, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and one such expert, has an answer to all these questions: Poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria infested, often landlocked; this makes it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with these endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor—they are in what economists call a “poverty trap.” Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them. This is why foreign aid is key: It can kick-start a virtuous cycle by helping poor countries invest in these critical areas and make them more productive. The resulting higher incomes will generate further investments; the beneficial spiral will continue. In his best-selling 2005 book, The End of Poverty,4 Sachs argues that if the rich world had committed $195 billion in foreign aid per year between 2005 and 2025, poverty could have been entirely eliminated by the end of this period.

But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs’s answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential anti-aid public figures, following the publication of two books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man’s Burden.5 Dambisa Moyo, an economist who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and at the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly’s with her recent book, Dead Aid.6 Both argue that aid does more bad than good: It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. The best bet for poor countries is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts, from foreigners or from their own governments. In this sense, the aid pessimists are actually quite optimistic about the way the world works. According to Easterly, there are no such things as poverty traps.

Whom should we believe? Those who tell us that aid can solve the problem? Or those who say that it makes things worse? The debate cannot be solved in the abstract: We need evidence. But unfortunately, the kind of data usually used to answer the big questions does not inspire confidence. There is never a shortage of compelling anecdotes, and it is always possible to find at least one to support any position. Rwanda, for example, received a lot of aid money in the years immediately after the genocide, and prospered. Now that the economy is thriving, President Paul Kagame has started to wean the country off aid. Should we count Rwanda as an example of the good that aid can do (as Sachs suggests), or as a poster child for self-reliance (as Moyo presents it)? Or both?

Because individual examples like Rwanda cannot be pinned down, most researchers trying to answer the big philosophical questions prefer multicountry comparisons. For example, the data on a couple of hundred countries in the world show that those that received more aid did not grow faster than the rest. This is often interpreted as evidence that aid does not work, but in fact, it could also mean the opposite. Perhaps the aid helped them avoid a major disaster, and things would have been much worse without it. We simply do not know; we are just speculating on a grand scale.

But if there is really no evidence for or against aid, what are we supposed to do—give up on the poor? Fortunately, we don’t need to be quite so defeatist. There are in fact answers—indeed, this whole book is in the form of an extended answer—it is just that they are not the kind of sweeping answers that Sachs and Easterly favor. This book will not tell you whether aid is good or bad, but it will say whether particular instances of aid did some good or not. We cannot pronounce on the efficacy of democracy, but we do have something to say about whether democracy could be made more effective in rural Indonesia by changing the way it is organized on the ground and so on.

In any case, it is not clear that answering some of these big questions, like whether foreign aid works, is as important as we are sometimes led to believe. Aid looms large for those in London, Paris, or Washington, DC, who are passionate about helping the poor (and those less passionate, who resent paying for it). But in truth, aid is only a very small part of the money that is spent on the poor every year. Most programs targeted at the world’s poor are funded out of their country’s own resources. India, for example, receives essentially no aid. In 2004–2005, it spent half a trillion rupees ($31 billion USD PPP)7 just on primary-education programs for the poor. Even in Africa, where foreign aid has a much more important role, it represented only 5.7 percent of total government budgets in 2003 (12 percent if we exclude Nigeria and South Africa, two big countries that receive very little aid).8

More important, the endless debates about the rights and wrongs of aid often obscure what really matters: not so much where the money comes from, but where it goes. This is a matter of choosing the right kind of project to fund—should it be food for the indigent, pensions for the elderly, or clinics for the ailing?—and then figuring out how best to run it. Clinics, for example, can be run and staffed in many different ways.

No one in the aid debate really disagrees with the basic premise that we should help the poor when we can. This is no surprise. The philosopher Peter Singer has written about the moral imperative to save the lives of those we don’t know. He observes that most people would willingly sacrifice a $1,000 suit to rescue a child seen drowning in a pond9 and argues that there should be no difference between that drowning child and the 9 million children who, every year, die before their fifth birthday. Many people would also agree with Amartya Sen, the economist-philosopher and Nobel Prize Laureate, that poverty leads to an intolerable waste of talent. As he puts it, poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.10 A poor girl from Africa will probably go to school for at most a few years even if she is brilliant, and most likely won’t get the nutrition to be the world-class athlete she might have been, or the funds to start a business if she has a great idea.

It is true that this wasted life probably does not directly affect people in the developed world, but it is not impossible that it might: She might end up as an HIV-positive prostitute who infects a traveling American who then brings the disease home, or she might develop a strain of antibiotic-resistant TB that will eventually find its way to Europe. Had she gone to school, she might have turned out to be the person who invented the cure for Alzheimer’s. Or perhaps, like Dai Manju, a Chinese teenager who got to go to school because of a clerical error at a bank, she would end up as a business tycoon employing thousands of others (Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn tell her story in their book Half the Sky).11 And even if she doesn’t, what could justify not giving her a chance?

The main disagreement shows up when we turn to the question, “Do we know of effective ways to help the poor?” Implicit in Singer’s argument for helping others is the idea that you know how to do it: The moral imperative to ruin your suit is much less compelling if you do not know how to swim. This is why, in The Life You Can Save, Singer takes the trouble to offer his readers a list of concrete examples of things that they should support, regularly updated on his Web site.12 Kristof and WuDunn do the same. The point is simple: Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some accessible solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress.

This is why it is really helpful to think in terms of concrete problems which can have specific answers, rather than foreign assistance in general: “aid” rather than “Aid.” To take an example, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), malaria caused almost 1 million deaths in 2008, mostly among African children.13 One thing we know is that sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets can help save many of these lives. Studies have shown that in areas where malaria infection is common, sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net reduces the incidence of malaria by half.14 What, then, is the best way to make sure that children sleep under bed nets?

For approximately $10, you can deliver an insecticide-treated net to a family and teach the household how to use it. Should the government or an NGO give parents free bed nets, or ask them to buy their own, perhaps at a subsidized price? Or should we let them buy it in the market at full price? These questions can be answered, but the answers are by no means obvious. Yet many “experts” take strong positions on them that have little to do with evidence.

Because malaria is contagious, if Mary sleeps under a bed net, John is less likely to get malaria—if at least half the population sleeps under a net, then even those who do not have much less risk of getting infected. 15 The problem is that fewer than one-fourth of kids at risk sleep under a net:16 It looks like the $10 cost is too much for many families in Mali or Kenya. Given the benefits both to the user and others in the neighborhood, selling the nets at a discount or even giving them away would seem to be a good idea. Indeed, free bed-net distribution is one thing that Jeffrey Sachs advocates. Easterly and Moyo object, arguing that people will not value (and hence will not use) the nets if they get them for free. And even if they do, they may become used to handouts and refuse to buy more nets in the future, when they are not free, or refuse to buy other things that they need unless these are also subsidized. This could wreck well-functioning markets. Moyo tells the story of how a bed-net supplier was ruined by a free bed-net distribution program. When free distribution stopped, there was no one to supply bed nets at any price.

To shed light on this debate, we need to answer three questions. First, if people must pay full price (or at least a significant fraction of the price) for a bed net, will they prefer to go without? Second, if bed nets are given to them free or at some subsidized price, will people use them, or will they be wasted? Third, after getting the net at subsidized price once, will they become more or less willing to pay for the next one if the subsidies are reduced in the future?

To answer these questions, we would need to observe the behavior of comparable groups of people facing different levels of subsidy. The key word here is “comparable.” People who pay for bed nets and people who get them for free are usually not going to be alike: It is possible that those who paid for their nets will be richer and better educated, and have a better understanding of why they need a bed net; those who got them for free might have been chosen by an NGO precisely because they were poor. But there could also be the opposite pattern: Those who got them for free are the well connected, whereas the poor and isolated had to pay full price. Either way, we cannot draw any conclusion from the way they used their net.

For this reason, the cleanest way to answer such questions is to mimic the randomized trials that are used in medicine to evaluate the effectiveness of new drugs. Pascaline Dupas, of the University of California at Los Angeles, carried out such an experiment in Kenya, and others followed suit with similar experiments in Uganda and Madagascar. 17 In Dupas’s experiment, individuals were randomly selected to receive different levels of subsidy to purchase bed nets. By comparing the behavior of randomly selected equivalent groups that were offered a net at different prices, she was able to answer all three of our questions, at least in the context in which the experiment was carried out.

In Chapter 3 of this book, we will have a lot to say about what she found. Although open questions remain (the experiments do not yet tell us about whether the distribution of subsidized imported bed nets hurt local producers, for example), these findings did a lot to move this debate and influenced both the discourse and the direction of policy.

The shift from broad general questions to much narrower ones has another advantage. When we learn about whether poor people are willing to pay money for bed nets, and whether they use them if they get them for free, we learn about much more than the best way to distribute bed nets: We start to understand how poor people make decisions. For example, what stands in the way of more widespread bed net adoption? It could be a lack of information about their benefits, or the fact that poor people cannot afford them. It could also be that the poor are so absorbed by the problems of the present that they don’t have the mental space to worry about the future, or there could be something entirely different going on. Answering these questions, we get to understand what, if anything, is special about the poor: Do they just live like everyone else, except with less money, or is there something fundamentally different about life under extreme poverty? And if it is something special, is it something that could keep the poor trapped in poverty?