Its been a whirlwind two months in India and this is a post which has been in the pipeline for a while (hence the length). For those unaware of my current research project, I’m working on a study of Microfinance Self-Help Groups in villages near Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh. It is the first time that I have conducted a real survey. Needless to say, it has given me a deep appreciation of the process of data collection and work of the surveyor.
First, designing a questionnaire is not simply about putting …

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s April 8 address the University of Chicago this past week emphasized burden-sharing in the war in Afghanistan and the lessons learned from NATO’s involvement. His “lessons learned” are informative in getting a sense of NATO perspective.

On a recent visit to Bogotá, Colombia, I witnessed how immense this city has become. Since 1950, Bogotá has grown from 700,000 inhabitants to approximately 8.5 million (estimate is inclusive of municipalities on the city’s periphery). Looking west from a friend’s terrace in the old colonial district of La Candelaria, I could see the city spreading across the vast Bogotá Savannah – a high plateau that rises to an average of 8500 feet above sea level in the Colombian Andes. However, this seemingly picturesque image conceals a …

Braving the inquisition that passes as passport control, I told the guard for the third time, phrased differently from my previous two attempts, that I was coming to Israel to study environmental policy in an exchange program between Harris and Tel Aviv University. You know, water and stuff?
At that, he laughed skeptically and waved me through the gates. Environmental policy in Israel is relatively new; the Ministry of Environment was created only ten years earlier and in some ways, skepticism is warranted. Transparency is lacking in national level policy. …

On March 9th, I tore myself from the prep for a Political Economy final to check out a talk by Gilles Dorronsoro on the recent escalation of the War in Afghanistan, as part of UChicago’s excellent “World Beyond the Headlines” series. The video from his lecture is not up yet, but keep a lookout for it (older ones include Stiglitz and Thurrow).
Preemptory conflict of interest note here: I worked with Gilles last year at the Carnegie Endowment. Which in this case was one of the reasons I have immense respect …

Last month, the McKinsey Global Institute published a discussion paper which argued that conventional wisdom , which says that US enjoys an “exorbitant privilege” because of the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, is wrong.  It estimates that the financial benefit to having the dollar as a global reserve currency, was in fact, a piddling $40 – $70 billion in a “normal” year and between -$5 to $25 billion in a “crisis” year.
The McKinsey results are interesting in that they appear to challenge a key defense of American proponents …

Aid in the health care sector in Cambodia is highly fragmented and it oftentimes misses the mark on improving health outcomes of Cambodians. Based on one student’s experience in Cambodia, this article offers a few lessons for improving aid policy abroad.

Aid is raised quickly – and the amount is much larger – thanks to networking and messaging technologies like Facebook and Twitter.