Development Economics and Policy xxi

But, at this point in time we have almost no evidence of long-term effects based on
RCTs and few systematic comparisons of the outcomes of RCTs across different
populations to improve our understanding of the conditions in which particular
interventions are most effective.
The limitations of cross-country empirical work have been increasingly recog-
nized in recent years, but as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there is still
much that can be learned from these exercises if appropriate judgment is exercised.
First, aggregate cross-country associations can be used to establish important regula-
rities (as in Freeman’s chapter on labor markets and Hanson’s on international labor
flows) or to cast doubt on policy presumptions based on incorrect assumptions
about cross-country relationships. The chapters by Harrison and Rodriguez-Clare
and by Kose provide important illustrations of the latter. As these authors discuss,
strongly held professional priors about the impact of trade and financial opening
on growth have been considerably weakened by the latest generation of cross-
country regressions. These cases represent learning—or perhaps more appropriately,
unlearning. History and case studies can also be useful, and many of our chapters
make strategic use of them. Schultz, for example, examines the historical demo-
graphic transition. He also shows that the existing macroevidence on the relation-
ship between fertility decline, which ages a population, and savings is weak or
nonexistent, even though the life-cycle model of savings predicts that savings should
rise as a consequence of aging. The impact of fertility decline on savings has been
one key motivation for population control polices. A second potential benefit of
using relationships among aggregate statistic is that they permit inferences about
externalities. For example, the microevidence on the causal effects of, say, health
or fertility change on individual wages captures private but ignores social gains from
polices that improve health or reduce family size. As Schultz and Behrman point out
in their respective chapters, there has in fact been little evidence on the externalities
of fertility, schooling, or health that help justify public interventions in these areas.
In the field of environment and natural capital, Dasgupta notes that it is possible to
learn from about household and village behaviour governing local ecosystems from
studies that differ greatly in style, ranging from narratives on individual lives to
econometric studies that cover many villages.
9. The experience of developing countries with diverse policies and institutions provides a rich lab-
oratory for learning about the effect of policies and institutional arrangements—so has made
important contribution to economics as an applied science. Policies and institutions in the
advanced nations tend to be stable and relatively uniform. Policies in the developing
nations tend to be in a flux, and both policies and institutions vary considerably
across time and space. This is both a blessing and a curse. You want to test the idea
that nominal variable can have no real effects? What better environment to look at
than developing countries with high inflation? Want to scrutinize the diverse ways