Rethinking Foreign Aid within an Institutional Context

Is foreign aid able to promote growth? Does it really help developing countries to escape out of poverty and to enforce democratic patterns? Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it does not. Not in the way, aid policy is implemented today. In the literature, there is still an ongoing debate whether foreign aid has a positive impact …

How Extremely Poor Deal with Unexpected Earnings

Imagine yourself walking in the desert without water for hours. Suddenly you find 1 liter bottle of water. Would you drink it all at once or react rationally, drinking just 200 ml and keep the rest for tomorrow? This is exactly what is happening to the poor when they find endowments or unexpected earnings. In …

The Dark Side of 2016 Olympics in Rio

  Major sport events such as the World Cup and the Olympics are often seen as a possibility of a country to camouflage domestic problems and represent itself as a great country. Therefore the upcoming Olympics in Rio are a prime example. Often the domestic policy disregards the involved issues of such a big event. …

Child marriage and the power of mental models

In 2014, an estimated number of 700 million women worldwide were married before of the age of 18, some 250 million women even before the age of 15. Although numbers of early marriage have decreased slowly in the last decades, 280 million girls are still at risk of being married off before the age of …

Framing poverty in television news. An analysis of the paper “Framing Responsibility For Political Issues: The Case of Poverty” by Shanto Iyengar (1990)

Introduction A main point of interest in behavioral development economics deals with the question how to fight poverty in developed as well as in developing countries. A first step to do so is to have a clear definition for poverty in mind. If a definition on this is found the problem of poverty can be …

Culture and Economic Development

  Introduction The effect of culture on economic development has been studied through various channels over the last decade. However this is a more complex topic than what it might seem! Considering the fact that culture is a very broad term, we need to define it as specific as possible in order to examine its …

Migrant Behavior

Though the idea of human development is a relatively new one, something inextricably connected with it, in fact, is not: Migration. We live in a world shaped by human migration. When people migrate they make a decision to leave their hometown or country to move elsewhere in search for shelter, to study, or to reunite …

The economics of family planning programs

The intention of this blog post is to start a discussion on what effects a family planning program can have on a family. I will not discuss the effects on population as this would be beyond the scope of this blog post. At the start I will investigate why families have so many children. In …

Is there a future for the healthcare system in Africa?

According to Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health, including medical care and the right to security in the event of sickness or disability” In reality the performance of this statement depends on the economic development of the country, thereby explaining differences in life expectancy …

Low-cost private education in developing countries

In the West and, based on the authors background, especially in Germany private education is seen as something for rich people, who can afford sending their children to expensive private schools. Following this preconceived idea, the standard assumption is, that the notion of private education being exclusively for rich people should be especially true for …