...help produce, analyze, and disseminate the household surveys used to determine whether global poverty is rising or falling; they work closely with client counterparts around the world to help establish datasets enabling policies to be designed and programs to be placed on the basis of a comprehensive evidence base; and they design rigorous assessments to discern the impacts of development policies and projects. For all these important accomplishments and contributions, however, DECRG falls short of its potential. By promoting economics as the sole lens through which to understand and respond to the development process, it restricts what is studied, delimits how those issues are analyzed, and thereby offers clients an unnecessarily narrow menu of policy options and strategies. In short, it has established a monopoly on development research, with most of the attendant distortions that economists, ironically enough, associate with monopolies.

Let us begin by stating the obvious: development is a diverse field speaking to virtually every aspect of human endeavor. As such, one might expect the core elements of this diversity to be reflected in the training of the Bank's research staff and the content of its research agenda. No single discipline can or should expect (or be expected) to be able to speak in an informed way to this diversity, yet at present all but a handful of the Bank's 100-plus research staff are economists. (2) Like any other discipline, economics is limited in its ability to pose and understand questions. This applies, we would argue, to issues within its domain, but it is more especially true of issues outside its domain. While economists have made a lot of progress in recent years in understanding key issues like institutions, collective action, and politics, the vast majority of noneconomist social scientists (and indeed many economists) would argue that areas of social, cultural, and political action are best studied by the social sciences that specialize (and thus have a comparative advantage) in these topics--namely, anthropology,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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