FRANCE: Duflo: economics can change the world

It was on a study trip to Moscow for her masters in history, during the last turbulent days of the Gorbatchev regime, that Esther Duflo realised how she could most effectively work against poverty - by becoming an economist. Last Thursday Duflo, now Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave her inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in Paris, as the first holder of a new International Chair in Knowledge Against Poverty created by the prestigious French institution.

"I have always been interested in development and poverty issues - I can't remember a time when I wasn't fascinated by this issue, the existence of poverty and a sense of responsibility," says Duflo.

"I thought I could help out by being a volunteer then I realised, working as a research assistant in Russia, that economists are in a privileged position to do something and by studying economics I could have much more influence and bring about change than by studying history and doing voluntary work."

Still only in her mid-30s, Duflo has since built up a formidable reputation in development economics, recognised for her innovative research methods and fieldwork experiments. Among honours and awards, she won the 2003 American Economic Association's Elaine Bennett prize for Research for women economists under 40; was named by Le Monde as the best young French economist in 2005, and by US magazine Foreign Policy as one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. The Economist has just nominated her among its eight young star economists.

She is founding editor of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and writes a monthly column for the French newspaper Libération. In her free time she enjoys rock and mountain climbing, walking, cooking and listening to music - especially Bach.

After graduating in history and economics from the Ecole Supérieure Normale in Paris and Delta (Department and Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Economics, now the Paris School of Economics), she continued her studies at MIT where after her PhD she became an assistant economics professor in 1999, rising to a full professorship in 2002.

Now she is director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) which she co-founded at MIT in 2003. Since then, a J-PAL field office has opened in Chennai, India, and J-PAL Europe was set up in 2007 at the Paris School of Economics.

J-PAL is a network of researchers in the development field, involving universities in the US, Europe and India, who apply scientific rigour to the programmes and evaluations they carry out in developing countries focusing on sectors such as education, health and microcredit.

The main feature of J-PAL research is that it is based on randomised evaluation - making sure the control group has the same characteristics as the group receiving the programme. Although the method is not new, it is through J-PAL that it has become widely used in development economics research.

"The idea is to take the research people are doing and make policy-makers aware of it, and take policy-makers' questions and make researchers do work that can be useful," says Duflo.

Duflo says she "learned many lessons" through her earlier experiences working with Pratham, an Indian NGO specialising in educational research: "It was a fantastic partner, very sophisticated. I learned the challenges of implementation, what you need to do and not do." With support from the Gates Foundation the programme expanded to cover several million children.

A crucial finding was that the curriculum had not been adapted since the time when schooling was designed for an elite. "India has made progress getting many children to school, but when they don't at first learn to read and then are promoted to the next class, they will never learn to read. That led us to evaluate a number of other programmes."

Duflo describes herself politically as "pragmatic left" although economists rather than politicians have inspired her. She singles out her former professor Daniel Cohen, with whom she worked in Russia where she became aware that "economics could be used to talk about the world"; and her contemporary Thomas Piketty, now a professor at the Paris School of Economics. Other influences were micro-economist Angus Deaton and Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen.

She returned to Paris in 2008 to become holder for the first year of the new International Chair in Savoirs contre Pauvreté (Knowledge against Poverty) at the Collège de France*. Established in partnership with AFD, the French Development Agency, at the initiative of Philippe Kourilsky, College of France Professor of Molecular Immunology, the five-year rotating chair will focus under Duflo on "Development economics", with themes in the remaining years covering access to water and energy, healthcare, health and growing urbanisation.

Duflo's inaugural lecture on Thursday was on the subject of 'Experiments, science and the fight against poverty', and her future lectures on 'World poverty and development' will take place on Mondays from 12 January until 2 February, covering in turn education, health, access to finance (microcredit), and governance and corruption.

In June a two-day symposium will take place on "Evaluation of development policies". The whole cycle will be available in French and English in audio and/or video on the Collège de France website

* See "Ancient college embraces teaching by podcast", University World News, 16 December 2007

jane.marshall@uw-news.com

Photo Credit: Hélène Giacobino