Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : thinking big versus thinking small / Jessica Cohen and William Easterly -- The new development economics : we shall experiment, but how shall we learn? / Dani Rodrik. Comment by Sendhil Mullainathan. Comment by Martin Ravallion -- Breaking out of the pocket : do health interventions work? Which ones and in what sense? / Peter Boone and Simon Johnson. Comment by Anne Case. Comment by Jessica Cohen -- Pricing and access : lessons from randomized evaluations in education and health / Michael Kremer and Alaka Holla. Comment by David N. Weil. Comment by Paul Romer -- The policy irrelevance of the economics of education : is "normative as positive" just useless, or worse? / Lant Pritchett. Comment by Benjamin A. Olken. Comment by Nancy Birdsall -- The other invisible hand : high bandwidth development policy / Ricardo Hausmann. Comment by Nava Ashraf. Comment by Ross Levine -- Big answers for big questions : the presumption of growth policy / Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee. Comment Peter Klenow. Comment by William Easterly.

"What Works in Development? brings together leading experts to address one of the most basic yet vexing issues in development: what do we really know about what works--and what doesn't--in fighting global poverty? The contributors, including many of the world's most respected economic development analysts, focus on the ongoing debate over which paths to development truly maximize results. Should we emphasize a big-picture approach--focusing on the role of institutions, macroeconomic policies, growth strategies, and other country-level factors? Or is a more grassroots approach the way to go, with the focus on particular microeconomic interventions such as conditional cash transfers, bed nets, and other microlevel improvements in service delivery on the ground? The book attempts to find a consensus on which approach is likely to be more effective"--Résumé de l'éditeur.