Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

they found no evidence that children born in smaller families are really more educated.

But the sex-education program, because it discourages extramarital sex and promotes marriage, focuses the girls on finding a husband (who more or less has to be a sugar daddy), undoing the effect of the uniforms.

Starting from scratch, it is possible to establish a set of good ground rules (his examples range from traffic congestion charges to marginal cost pricing for electricity, and of course include legal protection of property rights).

the decline in fertility over time was unrelated to the increase in the number of clinics.

that are misleading, confusing, or false.

When their results were released in Uganda, there was something of an uproar, with the result that the Ministry of Finance started giving the main national newspapers (and their local-language editions) month-by-month information about how much money had been sent to the districts for the schools. By 2001, when Reinikka and Svensson repeated their

Governments exist to a large extent to solve problems that markets cannot solve—we

five key lessons emerge.

Unless we can fully erase differences in income, public supply-side intervention that makes education cheaper would be necessary to get close to the socially efficient outcome: making sure that every child gets a chance.