In Making Aid Work, Abhijit Banerjee—an “aid optimist”—argues that aid has much to contribute to addressing the pressing problems of the world’s poor. However, the lack of analysis about which programs really work causes considerable waste and inefficiency. This in turn fuels unwarranted pessimism about the role of aid in fostering economic development.

Banerjee challenges aid donors to do better: to generate better evidence through randomized evaluations, as are used to test the efficacy of drugs, and to base their programs on the evidence generated. He also challenges those working on aid policy to stop looking for simple answers—a button to press—and get involved in the messy details of figuring out how to make things happen on the ground as you have to do when running a randomized trial.

Responding to his challenge, leaders in the field—including Nicholas Stern, Raymond Offenheiser, Angus Deaton, and others—discuss the limits to the questions that randomized trials answer. They also raise broader questions about the importance of aid for economic development and the kinds of interventions that will lead to real improvements in the lives of poor people around the world. With one in every six people now living in extreme poverty, getting it right is crucial.

The articles in this book first appeared in the Boston Review: http://bostonreview.net/BR31.4/banerjee.html
and http://bostonreview.net/BR32.2/banerjee.html.

The book is distributed by MIT Press.