World Development

1973 - 2025

Current editor(s): O. T. Coomes

From Elsevier
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Volume 127, issue C, 2020

Tracking the sustainable development goals: Emerging measurement challenges and further reflections

Hai-Anh Dang and Umar Serajuddin

Bridging the gaps in cognitive achievement in India: The crucial role of the integrated child development services in early childhood

Kriti Vikram and Namrata Chindarkar

Causes of Indonesia’s forest fires

Ryan Edwards, Rosamond L. Naylor, Matthew M. Higgins and Walter P. Falcon

The political economy of aid allocation: Aid and incumbency at the local level in Sub Saharan Africa

Tora Knutsen and Andreas Kotsadam

Does deforestation increase malaria prevalence? Evidence from satellite data and health surveys

Sebastian Bauhoff and Jonah Busch

The global diffusion of environmental clubs: how pressure from importing countries supports the chemical industry’s Responsible Care® program

Ellen Alexandra Holtmaat, Christopher Adolph and Aseem Prakash

Impact of use of technology on student learning outcomes: Evidence from a large-scale experiment in India

Gopal Naik, Chetan Chitre, Manaswini Bhalla and Jothsna Rajan

The Quality of Employment (QoE) in nine Latin American countries: A multidimensional perspective

Kirsten Sehnbruch, Pablo Gonzalez, Mauricio Apablaza, Rocío Méndez and Verónica Arriagada

The Brasília experiment: The heterogeneous impact of road access on spatial development in Brazil

Julia Bird and Stephane Straub

Intra-seasonal climate variability and crop diversification strategies in the Peruvian Andes: A word of caution on the sustainability of adaptation to climate change

Carmen Ponce San Roman

Environmental resources as ‘last resort’ coping strategies following harvest failures in Zimbabwe

Rose Pritchard, Isla M. Grundy, Dan van der Horst, Nyaradzo Dzobo and Casey M. Ryan

Identifying and disentangling the impact of fiscal decentralization on economic growth

Gustavo Canavire-Bacarreza, Jorge Martinez-Vazquez and Bauyrzhan Yedgenov

The politics of participation: Negotiating relationships through community forestry in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala

Naomi Millner, Irune Peñagaricano, Maria Fernandez and Laura K. Snook

Tourism and local welfare: A multilevel analysis in Nepal’s protected areas

Marie-Eve Yergeau

Oiling the bureaucracy? political spending, bureaucrats and the resource curse

Adam S. Harris, Rachel Sigman, Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, Kim Sass Mikkelsen and Christian Schuster

Poverty reduction saves forests sustainably: Lessons for deforestation policies

Motoe Miyamoto

Private sector development and provincial patterns of poverty: Evidence from Vietnam

Alexander Jaax

An analysis of UNFCCC-financed coastal adaptation projects: Assessing patterns of project design and contributions to adaptive capacity

Laura Kuhl, Kyla Van Maanen and Steven Scyphers

Are we on the right path to achieve the sustainable development goals?

Jonathan D. Moyer and Steve Hedden

Land consolidation as technical change: Economic impacts in rural Vietnam

Huy Quynh Nguyen and Peter Warr

Variety of indigenous peoples’ opinions of large infrastructure projects: The TIPNIS road in the Bolivian Amazon

Victoria Reyes-García, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Jonathan Bauchet and Ricardo Godoy

Governance quality, remittances and their implications for food and nutrition security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Adebayo Isaiah Ogunniyi, George Mavrotas, Kehinde Oluseyi Olagunju, Olusegun Fadare and Rufai Adedoyin

Designing for engagement: A Realist Synthesis Review of how context affects the outcomes of multi-stakeholder forums on land use and/or land-use change

Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Anne M. Larson, Christopher Hewlett and Deborah Delgado

Soil and Water Conservation technology adoption and labour allocation: Evidence from Ethiopia

Francisco Pereira Fontes

Bridging the financial inclusion gender gap in smallholder agriculture in Nigeria: An untapped potential for sustainable development

Olayinka O. Adegbite and Charles Machethe

Intra-household inequality, fairness and productivity. Evidence from a real effort experiment

Faith Masekesa and Alistair Munro

Leader turnover and forest management outcomes: Micro-level evidence from Ethiopia

Goytom Kahsay and Haileselassie Medhin

Remittances, health insurance, and pension contributions: Evidence from Colombia

Andres Cuadros-Menaca

Management adaptation to flood in Guangdong Province in China: Do property rights Matter?

Jayanthi Thennakoon, Christopher Findlay, Jikun Huang and Jinxia Wang

‘The struggle isn’t over’: Shifting aid paradigms and redefining ‘development’ in eastern Myanmar

Anne Décobert

Technical efficiency and technology gap of the manufacturing industry in China: Does firm ownership matter?

Barnabé Walheer and Ming He

Do remotely-sensed vegetation health indices explain credit risk in agricultural microfinance?

Johannes Möllmann, Matthias Buchholz, Wienand Kölle and Oliver Musshoff

Redefining the social contract in the wake of the Arab Spring: The experiences of Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia

Amirah El-Haddad

Steel in a circular economy: Global implications of a green shift in China

Victor Nechifor, Alvaro Calzadilla, Raimund Bleischwitz, Matthew Winning, Xu Tian and Arkaitz Usubiaga

Poverty alleviation and local environmental degradation: An empirical analysis in Colombia

Daniele Malerba

The dark side of environmental peacebuilding

Tobias Ide

Smaller-scale land grabs and accumulation from below: Violence, coercion and consent in spatially uneven agrarian change in Shan State, Myanmar

Kevin M. Woods

Searching under the streetlight: A historical perspective on the rise of randomistas

Luciana de Souza Leão and Gil Eyal

How experimental research in agriculture has gone from lab to field

Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet

The environmental effects of poverty programs and the poverty effects of environmental programs: The missing RCTs

Francisco Alpizar Rodriguez and Paul Ferraro

Good will hunting: Challenges of theory-based impact evaluations for climate investments in a multilateral setting

Jyotsna Puri, Archi Rastogi, Martin Prowse and Solomon Asfaw

Large-scale randomized control trials of incentive-based conservation: What have we learned?

Nigel Asquith

Research standards in empirical development economics: What’s well begun, is half done

Alexandra Avdeenko and Markus Frölich

Randomized control trial as social observatory: A case study

Sarah Baird, Joan Hamory Hicks and Owen Ozier

A twenty-year partnership of practice and research: The Nobel laureates and Pratham in India

Rukmini Banerji and Madhav Chavan

Finding our balance? Revisiting the randomization revolution in development economics ten years further on

Christopher Barrett and Michael R. Carter

Randomized interventions and “real” treatment effects: A cautionary tale and an example

Erwin Bulte, Salvatore Di Falco and Robert Lensink

Experiments, observations, and group psychology

Michael Cox

(Don’t) leave politics out of it: Reflections on public policies, experiments, and interventions

Sabyasachi Das

The influence of the 2019 nobel prize winners on agricultural economics

Alan de Brauw and Vivian Hoffmann

To RCT or not, is not the question: Methods for policy-relevant research on gender equality

Arjan de Haan, Gillian Dowie and Jane Mariara

Equal opportunities to enhance growth

Rafael De Hoyos

Good identification, meet good data

Andrew Dillon, Dean Karlan, Christopher Udry and Jonathan Zinman

Policy beyond evidence

Jean Drèze

Challenges in using RCTs for evaluation of large-scale public programs with complex designs: Lessons from Peru

Javier Escobal and Carmen Ponce San Roman

The embodied counterfactual

Fiona Gedeon Achi

How the cases you choose affect the answers you get, revisited

Rachel Gisselquist

The role of theory and randomized trials for education policy in developing countries

Paul Glewwe

“Follow the yellow brick road”?: Structural shortcomings in randomized control trials

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

How to know what works in alleviating poverty: Learning from experimental approaches in qualitative research

Alexandra Hartman and Florian G. Kern

Involuntary experiments in former colonies: The case for a moratorium

Nimi Hoffmann

The aggregation challenge

Macartan Humphreys and Alexandra Scacco

Zen and the art of experiments: A note on preventive healthcare and the 2019 nobel prize in economics

Jishnu Das

‘Misbehaving’ RCTs: The confounding problem of human agency

Naila Kabeer

Do no harm? Field research in the Global South: Ethical challenges faced by research staff

Lennart Kaplan, Jana Kuhnt and Janina Steinert

Poverty, power and RCTs

Devesh Kapur

From experimental findings to evidence-based policy

Philipp Krause and Gonzalo Hernández Licona

Impoverished economics? A critical assessment of the new gold standard

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

An editor’s-eye view of randomized controlled trials

Heidi McGowan

If it needs a power calculation, does it matter for poverty reduction?

David McKenzie

Lessons from using cluster-randomized evaluations to build evidence on large-scale nutrition behavior change interventions

Purnima Menon, Marie Ruel, Phuong Nguyen, Sunny S. Kim, Karin Lapping, Edward A. Frongillo and Silvia Alayon

The challenges of scaling effective interventions: A path forward for research and policy

C. Austin Davis and Ahmed Mobarak

Why RCTs failed to answer the biggest questions about microcredit impact

Jonathan Morduch

Bridging the academic-practitioner gap in RCTs

A. Rani Parker, Eric Coleman, Jacob Manyindo, Emmanuel Mukuru and Bill Schultz

Randomization for women’s economic empowerment? Lessons and limitations of randomized experiments

Janneke Pieters and Stephan Klasen

Does the RCT tail wag the implementation dog?

Pieternella Pieterse

Randomized controlled trials of multi-sectoral programs: Lessons from development research

Agnes Quisumbing, Akhter Ahmed, Daniel Gilligan, John Hoddinott, Neha Kumar, Jef Leroy, Purnima Menon, Deanna K. Olney, Shalini Roy and Marie Ruel

Evidence-based development needs a diversity of tools, with a bottom-up process of “embedded” dialogue

Vijayendra Rao

Highly prized experiments

Martin Ravallion

Reasons for policy experimentation that have nothing to do with selection bias

Cyrus Samii

Small development questions are important, but they require big answers

Sara Stevano

Making evaluation matter: Capturing multiple realities and voices for sustainable development

Sonal Zaveri

Have RCTs brought back the “Empirical” into Economics?

Aardra Surendran and Awanish Kumar

How developed countries can learn from developing countries to tackle climate change

Stefano Carattini, Greer Gosnell and Alessandro Tavoni

Contributions of experimental approaches to development and poverty alleviation: Field experiments and humanitarian assistance

John Quattrochi, Jenny C. Aker, Peter van der Windt and Maarten Voors

The implications of a fundamental contradiction in advocating randomized trials for policy

Sean Muller

RCTs as an opportunity to promote interdisciplinary, inclusive, and diverse quantitative development research

Joana Naritomi, Sandra Sequeira, Jonathan Weigel and Diana Weinhold

Beyond ‘context matters’: Context and external validity in impact evaluation

Martin J. Williams

The impact of high-speed rail on innovation: An empirical test of the companion innovation hypothesis of transportation improvement with China’s manufacturing firms

Yanyan Gao and Jianghuai Zheng

A typology of adopters and nonadopters of improved sorghum seeds in Tanzania: A deep learning neural network approach

Aloyce R. Kaliba, Richard J. Mushi, Anne G. Gongwe and Kizito Mazvimavi

Environmental urgency versus the allure of RCT empiricism

Saleem H. Ali