In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, World Bank Chief Economist François Bourguignon replies to a piece entitled “World Bank Challenged: Are the Poor Really Helped?” published on July 28.
According to the World Bank press review Wednesday Bourguignon writes that over the last 40 years, life expectancy in developing countries has increased by 20 years; adult illiteracy was nearly halved to 25 percent in the last 30 years; and from 1981 to 2001 the proportion of people living in poverty in the developing world dropped from 40 to 21 percent. But the World Bank still strives to measure and improve the effectiveness of its programs.
– The banks operations evaluation department recently concluded that three out of four projects met their objectives. The critical question to ask for development effectiveness, however, is how the project changed what would have happened in its absence, writes Bourguignon adding:
– Here, we increasingly use the randomization approach you discussed, sometimes in partnership with MITs Poverty Action Lab. But often, randomization does not work or is not appropriate in evaluating some policies, like fiscal reforms.
– For these, we rely on other approaches to estimate what would have happened. The bank evaluates every project it undertakes to find better ways of helping poor people, and it chooses methods according to the policy in question.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
