The Development Research Institute (DRI), founded in 2003, is devoted to research on the economic development and growth of poor countries and to advising aid agencies how to improve their performance.
The DRI has brought a fresh approach to aid and development research, helping ensure that the economic aid rich countries provide to the developing world is better utilized. Its results question certain mainstream assumptions in development cooperation, like the idea that more generosity on the part of rich donor countries will have an automatic pay-off in poor country development.
The DRI is co-led by two economics professors at New York University, William Easterly (1957, Morgan Town, West Virginia, USA) and Yaw Nyarko (1960, Accra, Ghana). Easterly holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert in the political economy of development and the study of the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, especially Africa, Latin America and Russia.
Yaw Nyarko, one of the most highly ranked African academic economists in the world, is Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and has acted as a consultant to organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations.
Speech
Development Cooperation, 2nd edition
Getting the right formula to channel more – and more effective – aid to economically disadvantaged countries, especially in Africa, and in the process overturning assumptions and challenging methods that have failed to deliver in the past. These were the goals that inspired Yaw Nyarko and William Easterly, professors at New York University, to set up the Development Research Institute (DRI) in 2003. The work of this Institute, which they co-lead, has earned it the 2009 Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Development Cooperation.
As a first step, Easterly and Nyarko decided to turn aside from traditional methods of dubious effectiveness, and put the most advanced social and economic research systems to work on the problem. The approach allowed them to first identify and later denounce the poverty traps hindering the development of many countries or regions. From this initial work grew the DRI, which has from the outset been closely affiliated with Africa House, an inter-disciplinary institute founded and led by Nyarko and devoted to the study of contemporary Africa, focusing on economic, political, and social issues as well as programs in the arts.
A non-governmental organization, DRI has kept up a steady stream of publications, communiqués, conference appearances, etc., that have drawn in a growing number of researchers from a variety of disciplines. Students too have lent eager support to DRI and its aims. Encouragingly, their numbers include a large representation from different parts of Africa – something relatively rare in the development assistance universe. Together they are helping achieve one of the goals set by Easterly and Nyarko: to engage the academic world and the wider public with the search for hard-headed solutions to world poverty.
Perhaps the most unique of its initiatives is Aid Watch, founded on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid. A philosophy summed up in two quotations that DRI has taken as its Aid Watch axioms. The first, a reflection by Henry Louis Mencken, an early-20th-century American journalist whose influential writings earned him the nickname the “Sage of Baltimore”: “Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking”; the second, an observation by Supreme Court Justice Louise Dembitz Brandeis, born in Louisville in 1856 and among the first to embrace advertising as a power for social good, to the effect that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
A key mechanism to identify and root out problems is the Aid Watch Blog launched in 2009 as a platform for debate and exchange of experiences around the ideas championed by Nyarko and Easterly. In its inaugural year, the blog welcomed over 300,000 visits from 208 countries with users contributing their own ideas or seeking to answer questions such as that posed by Easterly in the article “Where Does the Money Go?”. For while it is true that there are many forces lined up in the fight against poverty – from large organizations like the World Bank to anonymous citizens in every country and an interminable list of NGOs – we still need effective ways to make the distributors of aid accountable for their actions.
Otherwise the system will descend into arbitrariness and lose all credibility with those it is trying to help. This, precisely, is what Aid Watch seeks to avoid by deploying reliable control procedures backed by DRI’s reputation for management transparency.
Yaw Nyarko, born in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in 1960, is himself an example of the brain drain phenomenon which he explores in depth in Skilled Immigration Today: Prospects, Problems and Policies, in a chapter written jointly with co-director William Easterly. Professor of Economics at New York University, Nyarko, who also divides his time between DRI and Africa House, is never far from his origins. He remembers with emotion his first years at secondary school in Kumawu: “Conditions were harsh at that time. There was little running water, and electricity only in the evenings.” But when he looks back now, from just the other side of fifty and a secure position as one of the world’s foremost African economists, he softens to some extent: “I still consider this a crucial part of my education, which has been important in defining who I am now.”
William Easterly was born in 1957 in West Virginia, and grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he also completed his bachelor’s degree before going on to obtain a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Like DRI co-director Nyarko, he is currently Professor of Economics at New York University. An associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, his name appears among the top one hundred economists in the RePEc ranking published by the University of Connecticut’s Ideas service. Co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics, Easterly is also on the faculty at Africa House.
