This week’s edition of The Chronicles of Unpacking is entitled “How much of my lifetime income was spent on all of these books, and why are there never enough shelves?” We’ve been unboxing books over the last four days, and we’re almost finished, but ran out of shelf space some time ago—a few are st...

This week was the Centre for the Study of African Economies’ annual conference. Every year, scholars from around the world—including many based on the African continent—convene to present their research findings on a vast array of topics. This year’s conference included more than 200 presentations o...

A few years ago, one of us (Abhijeet) wrote a cautionary note that the “standard deviation” measure in education evaluations in development economics was not typically comparable. That note was based on the informal observation that tests in development evaluations seemed to vary a lot from one stud...

I’m very grateful  to Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, for his discussion of Zack Gehan and my paper on future growth forecasts and poverty in 2050. There is much to agree with in his analysis, but I’d disagree with his statement “our focus should be on...

In the next few weeks, the OECD will release its estimate of ODA—Official Development Assistance—provided by member countries, and will no doubt claim yet another record high. But this inflated measure has lost its credibility, in large part because its definition is governed solely by ODA-providing...

The UK's Energy Price Guarantee increased CO2 emissions by 3.2 million tonnes over the period October 2022-April 2023—double the achievements of UK climate mitigation aid over the same period, which we estimate at a reduction of just 1.6 million tonnes of CO2, demonstrating that when it is expedient...

A week into the house move there are definite signs of progress: we have a sofa, which has been thoroughly colonised by my son, who has mastered the art of arranging his four rather small limbs and body in such a fashion as to occupy as large a surface area as possible; the boxes have graduated from...