The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) was founded in 2003 by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to promote the use of randomized evaluation in development assistance, along the lines of the methods used to test new drugs and vaccines. Its mission is to is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence, which it does through research, policy outreach, and training.
J-PAL analyzes development assistance programs to determine whether the funds invested are being properly utilized and are delivering the desired results, something similar to the way an audit works in the corporate environment. Experts in development economics believe the scientific tools this laboratory deploys represent a before and after in aid program evaluation.
The Lab is led by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster and Benjamin Olken, and runs a network of 145 affiliated professors from 49 universities who provide research, outreach and training, as well as six regional offices in South Asia, Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean, Africa, SE Asia and North America. En 2014, it received the Albert O. Hirschman Prize of the U.S. Social Science Research Council.
Since receiving the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2008), Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Science (2019).
Speech
Development Cooperation, 1st edition
Humanity faces few challenges as vital as the relief of poverty. But is this really a battle that can be waged in the realms of science? It may appear not, but appearances can be deceptive. The members of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have successfully applied the scientific method to development assistance programs. And the results have been frankly surprising. Until the research work done by this organization, founded by three supremely talented economists, no one had documented how such a simple measure as treating intestinal worms in children could bring benefits to a whole community, or the importance of anti-malarial bednets being distributed free of charge. Experts in development economics believe the scientific tools developed by J-PAL represent a watershed in aid program evaluation.
“J-PAL was created to measure the real impact of aid policies on the ground accurately. Aid has to be seen to be working,” declares Esther Duflo, one of the laboratory’s co-founders. For her and her colleagues, program evaluation is one of the priority issues in cooperation, and an essential way to distinguish what is effective from what is merely cosmetic.
J-PAL is a research center attached to the Economics Department at MIT. Founded in 2003 by Duflo and two other young economists of international repute – Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan (currently at Harvard) – it now has 30 research affiliates all over the world as well as regional offices in the Paris School of Economics and the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai, India. Its overarching goal is to fight poverty by ensuring that relief policies are based on sound scientific evidence.
The breakthrough achievement of J-PAL researchers has been to apply the randomized trials used in clinical testing of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines to development assistance programs. By this means, they can gauge the influence of not only straightforward, practical actions but also other factors more resistant to measurement by social and economic researchers, such as corrupt officialdom or the presence of female leaders in a community.
What, for instance, changes when posts of decision-making power are occupied by women?
Before J- PAL researchers got to work, the question of women’s access to power was considered too complex a phenomenon to study and quantify scientifically. But Duflo and her team took note that India’s government had reserved village council posts for women in a series of randomly selected communities, and applied qualitative and quantitative methods to study whether this had a local impact on gender bias. What they found was that reserving them positions of power meant women became far more active in decision-making processes, and also boosted the community’s investment in infrastructure that women judged important. Moreover, the presence of female leaders overcame engrained prejudices about women in politics.
Randomized trials have also been able to show how measures applied to a small group can impact on an entire community. Take the case of the deworming programs to eliminate the intestinal parasites that afflict 400 million children worldwide. A J-PAL research team compared the school absenteeism of adolescent girls, who were excluded from deworming campaigns for fear they might be pregnant, at centers where other children were receiving the treatment and at centers where no one was being treated. They discovered that these girls’ attendance was significantly better at schools where other classmates had been treated. The reason was simple: the drugs interrupted the disease’s transmission cycle and reduced the parasitical load within the community.
There were even spillover effects, with other schools near the treated centers also registering improvements. This project was distinguished with the prestigious Kenneth Arrow Award for the best health economics research, and is the inspiration behind the “Deworm the World” initiative – launched at the World Economic Forum by the organization Young Global Leaders. A number of international institutions like the World Health Organization and the World Bank are also promoting deworming campaigns in schools.
“Schools in developing countries are extremely poor,” explains Duflo. “They have few books and little material. So you might think the best way to help is by giving them things. But we have realized that in many African countries the best way to fight school absenteeism is by delivering deworming drugs, which cost as little as half a euro per child per year. I see economics as a human science, rigorous but also humble, generous and committed.”
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has expanded its activities in a very short time. It now runs a network of local researchers engaged in 70 projects spread across 22 countries, covering topics from keeping young people in school education to racial discrimination in developed world job markets.
At the time of writing, J-PAL is led by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Rachel Glennerster. Abhijit Banerjee (India, 1961) is an economics professor at MIT as well as co-director of J-PAL. With Esther Duflo, he has conducted randomized evaluations applied to school education. He has also assessed reforms of informal schools in tribal areas of India, working closely with a local NGO. Esther Duflo (France, 1972), the other co-director, is also an economics professor at MIT. Her work includes randomized evaluations of policies to promote agricultural productivity in Kenya and a study on the impact of women and lower caste members of village councils in India. Rachel Glennerster (United Kingdom, 1965) is executive director of J-PAL. Her current research focuses on community driven development in Sierra Leone, empowerment of adolescent girls in Bangladesh, and health, education, and microfinance in India.
