FIELD EXPERIMENTS AND CUSTOMIZABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICIES:THE NOBEL PRIZE IN 2019
The Management Accountant|November 2019
Recently, Prof. Esther Duflo was invited to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, a premier social science research institute with strong international repute, to deliver the R. C. Dutt Lectures in Economics.
Dr. Saibal Kar Professor of Economics Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta Research Fellow, IZA Bonn Director (Hon.), Eastern Regional Centre, ICSSR Managing Editor, South Asian Journal of Macroeconomics and Public Finance (SAGE)
FIELD EXPERIMENTS AND CUSTOMIZABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICIES:THE NOBEL PRIZE IN 2019

The said lecture series has historically been adorned by seminar presentations from economists of global standing persuading audience from various disciplines about how the philosophy and mechanism of economic actions touches upon the perpetual existence of the mankind. In true sense the lectures have been seminal in their approaches and outreach.

In the year 2003, Prof. Abhijit Banerjee had given this lecture focusing predominantly on how the spread of information leads to various economic outcomes, some of which are often unwarranted socially and politically speaking. This year Esther Duflo spoke about how an economist with intent to change the development outcomes should behave like a plumber on the site rather than a distant planner and policymaker. The reason for invoking this brief introduction is that both Prof. Banerjee and Prof. Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now married to each other, along with Prof. Michael Kremer of Harvard University, and all working intensively with the now famous Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (or J-Pal), have been awarded the highest accolade for contributing to the subject of Economics. The Nobel committee claimed that the contributions of the trio have helped in addressing poverty reduction around the world quite significantly. This short article will try to discuss some achievements of the sustained work in this matter over the last two decades and argue that the main tenets of the principle of Randomized Controlled Trials (or RCT) has a strong relationship with the information gap that lies at the core of failures in implementing policies successfully for any given nation.

This story is from the November 2019 edition of The Management Accountant.

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This story is from the November 2019 edition of The Management Accountant.

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