• Friday, April 01, 2011
• Inter Press Service

French economist Esther Duflo thinks poverty can be alleviated or even eradicated with the right policies. All it takes is for politicians to 'translate research into action,' implementing programmes that have been shown to work.

But that is easier said than done. Duflo, who last year won American Economic Association's prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, acknowledges that it is sometimes frustrating to get policy makers to apply the results of research that could improve people's lives. Sometimes they do not know the evidence and so cannot take the right approach, she adds.

In April, Duflo's new book, 'Poor economics: a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty', will once more turn the spotlight on actions to tackle poverty. Co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee, the book aims to make 2011 the year that the 'economics of poverty' become a key part of international political discussions.

'Fundamentally, I think it is a subject that people are interested in,' Duflo told IPS. 'The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.' The 38-year-old Duflo, who is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who often lectures in France as well, is credited with making development economics 'chic', according to some French reviewers.

Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.

'It was not considered a fancy area of study,' she says. 'There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have some advisors and mentors.'

Duflo's major role in the field has been to use research to show which programmes are the most effective in combating poverty. According to MIT, her work 'uses randomized field experiments to identify highly specific programmes that can alleviate poverty, ranging from low-cost medical treatments to innovative education programmes.'

In a landmark study, Duflo, along with Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, executive director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), discovered that the rate at which families in northern India will immunize their children jumps from about 5 percent to nearly 40 percent when parents are offered a small bag of lentils as an incentive.

Duflo seems an unlikely person to try to argue with those in power. Slightly built and eschewing the glamourous-intelligentsia look for which many French intellectuals are known, she seems at first glance to be a down-at-heel graduate student.

When she begins talking, however, there is no doubting the importance of her research. What she does is backed by scientific evidence, demonstrated by graphs and other tools. Duflo is also a director of MIT’s J-PAL, an organization she co-founded in 2003 with Banerjee, MIT’s Ford International Professor of Economics, and Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist who now teaches at Harvard University.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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