Macro dimensions of poverty brushed aside -Pritam Singh

-The Tribune

A serious methodological flaw of the RCT approach that has been pointed out by ethnographic studies of poverty is that its overemphasis on quantitative method has deprived it of the insights of qualitative methods. There is some recognition of the flaw by admitting that a mixed method approach can be useful, but the approach remains hostile to qualitative methods.

THE award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Michael Kremer of Harvard University deserves not only to be celebrated but also critically reflected upon.

Duflo is only the second woman economist to win this prize since it was instituted in 1969. The first was Elinor Ostrom for her analysis of economic governance, especially relating to ‘common’ ecological resources, thus raising the status of ecological economics. Duflo (46), is also the youngest-ever winner of this prize along with being the only woman among this year’s 16 Nobel Prize winners. Gender bias remains an old problem of this prize. The most celebrated woman economist of all times, Joan Robinson of Cambridge University, was never given this prize due to ideological reasons though her work on imperfect competition has been pioneering in breaking the assumptions of perfectly competitive markets.

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