Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation
Main content start

Speaker Series with Ted Miguel

A conversation on donor conditionality and international development outcomes

The Series features talks by distinguished scholars and policymakers with the goal of fostering discussions about successes and challenges in the field of poverty alleviation.

Event Details:

Thursday, June 2, 2022
4:30pm - 5:30pm PDT

Location

Gunn SIEPR Building

Contact

This event is open to:

Alumni/Friends
Faculty/Staff
General Public
Students
work, Entrepreneurship, and finance

Every year, low- and middle-income countries receive $30 billion in loans and other aid from multilateral agencies. Such aid traditionally comes with strict conditions, the effectiveness of which has been widely debated for the past few decades. Do conditions promote accountability and development impacts? At what cost to the recipient country’s institutions or political independence? 

The debate on conditionality has been reignited by the recent surge in loans from new sources, including China, that impose few to no conditions on recipient countries. Our speaker Edward Miguel, Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley discussed current tensions, building on the example of a large-scale, foreign-aid funded electrification program in Kenya.

The entire conversation is now available to watch on YouTube.

 

About the speaker:

Edward Miguel

Edward "Ted" Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. 

His research focuses on African economic development and includes work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; and interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor. He has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. 

More recently, Miguel has focused his efforts on increasing transparency in social science research. Along with colleagues, such as Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo, Dean Karlan and Abhijit Banerjee, he has pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials and other rigorous evaluation methods to test the impact of development interventions in the field. He is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at U.C. Berkeley.

Complete Bio
About the moderator:

Pascaline Dupas

Pascaline Dupas is the Kleinheinz Family Professor of International Studies, a senior fellow at both the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute, and the faculty director of the Stanford King Center on Global Development. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society; an affiliate and board member of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab; a fellow at Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research; and an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action. Before coming to Stanford, Dupas was an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth and the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics.

Dupas focuses her research on scalable policies for improving household well-being in low income countries. Among other projects, she has conducted experiments throughout Africa to determine how best to price, target, and distribute essential health products. She received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and was named the Best French Economist by Le Monde in 2015. She is a past editor of the Journal of Development Economics, and currently sits on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics; and American Economic Review: Insights.

Related Topics

Explore More Events