The Absent Voices of Development Economics
Development economics focuses on improving the well-being of billions of people in low-income countries, but the Global South is severely underrepresented in the field. A small number of rich-country institutions dominate, and their growing use of randomized controlled trials in research is entrenching the imbalance.
NEW DELHI – The lack of representation of marginalized groups in the corridors of power – political, financial, and cultural – is a growing source of global concern. Knowledge confers power, so who creates it matters. As the Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously said, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws…if I can write its textbooks.”