Kojo Nnamdi Podcast with Michael Clemens - Care Workers Around the World
8/16/12
The vast majority of people who care for children, the elderly and disabled in wealthy places like the United States come from developing countries. It's work that some say falls into the "3-D" category (dirty, difficult and demeaning). Immigrants who do these jobs are typically paid poorly and offered few basic workplace protections. It's a trend that's also creating care gaps in the families and societies these workers leave behind. We look at both ends of what’s known as the “global care chain.”
Development is easy, right? All poor countries have to do is mimic the things that work in rich countries and they’ll evolve into fully functional states. If only it were that simple. My guest this week is 
Behavioral economics seeks to complement traditional approaches to economics by incorporating insights from psychology and human behavior, and taking a behavioral approach allows us to understand a host of behaviors that are critical to the success of a variety of development policies. In this event, Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta will present a paper exploring how behavioral economics can inform development policy, from education to health to cash transfer programs. Drawing on the latest research in these and other areas, the authors will discuss how behavioral economics provides policymakers with innovative new ways of tackling many important issues in development.
Over the last 15 years, development economists have carefully accumulated rigorous evidence about what works and what does not in promoting health in poor countries. While each individual evaluation tests specific questions or sets of questions in specific contexts, the large number of studies now means that it is possible to draw more general conclusions. In addition, randomized evaluations are increasingly being designed to test fundamental questions about how people behave and thus generate lessons that are relevant for the design of different types of programs. In this seminar, Michael Kremer will discuss a new research paper co-authored with Rachel Glennerster, Lessons from Randomized Evaluations for Improving Health in Developing Countries, which summarizes lessons from the growing body of randomized evaluations of health programs in developing countries. The paper finds considerable evidence that consumers do not always invest optimally in health. In particular, consumers underinvest in cost-effective products for prevention and non-acute care of communicable disease and are very sensitive to the price and convenience of these products. This underinvestment does not simply reflect a lack of information of the benefits of preventative health. While this suggests the need for government intervention, many government health systems perform poorly and there is little accountability and few incentives for health care providers. Of the approaches designed to improve accountability, community or nongovernmental monitoring has had mixed results but district-level contracting has been quite successful. Many programs can improve health without excessive reliance on dysfunctional health delivery systems—delivering health products through schools for example, or improving health through water treatment. 