1. Does Africa need saving or do the saviors need Africa? Its a mutual relationship.

Although Africas condition might not as bad we think it is, many of its indicators are relatively lower than the rest of the world. With the poverty cycle in progress, we have to intervene to help them break the cycle. 2. Dr. Easterly details the conflict between those who favor a transformational and those who favor a marginal approach. Which would you advocate? Keep in mind that Easterly obviously has his own biases and that resources have to be provided for anything to even be attempted. I would support the marginal approach, transformational approach might not be efficient as we assume that the market at Africa can be that efficient compared to the ones in European or the United States (like we send a package and it might be hard for them to decide what goes in what). It will merely be an increase in numbers rather than the actual effect. 3. What do testability issues mean for debates about different approaches to development? Since the testability issues address the different in goal. Essentially, the debate about different approaches is a debate about which goal to accomplish? 4. On pages 12 and 13, Dr. Easterly discusses some negative statistics related to Africa and discusses the disparity between them a little bit. Might there be any sampling issues with the first table and what are we to make of his comments about The Four Horsemen and an obviously too real aid constituency? Were the samples chosen at random? If they are not randomly chosen, the conclusion for African countries might not be valid. If it is more likely to happen in Africa then anywhere on the Earth then Africas The Four Horsemen are still relatively high. If his point is that its too low, then is it necessary to aid them at all? 5. Do you believe that Africa is stuck in a poverty trap and why or why not?

6. On pages 7-8 and again on page 29, Easterly quotes Abhijit Banerjee. What do you think of his comments and what do you think that they mean for development? I think it talks the truth to a large extend. Growth might not come from what we can control. It might be several other events or variables that happen to work together. In order to have growth, its not about solely pushing, there has to be several improvements that come together to make growth happen. 7. What should we take away from Easterlys repeated references to the Hailey Report?

8. Randomized Evaluation is in many ways the cutting edge of current development research. What do you find to be its strengths and weaknesses as an approach both for our understanding and practically? Strengths: it measures the effects directly, less costly, and more objective. Weakness: it is not applicable to all situations, if there is only one group of treatment, then the result is not valid, it does not tell us the overall effects of the experiment, RE does not take into account general equilibrium effects of a marginal aid project. 9. Several years ago, when the first anti-retroviral therapeutic drugs were being shipped to Southern Africa for free distribution, a portion of the boxes were marked with electronic tracking devices. They were found entering The Netherlands roughly two weeks after delivery. Should we be shocked by this? What does it mean for aid? This has shown the problem of fungibility. Instead of being used for the healthcare purposes, they can also be exported as a good. And thus that would increase GDP of the country. Therefore, instead of having a marginal effect on the economy, its marginal effect is distorted and will have a transformational effect but has not yet been taken into account in literature. 10. In a footnote, Easterly points out that the British mining companies in Zambia and the German colonial authority in Tanzania seemed to have little real trouble controlling malaria, while billions of dollars of aid cannot seem to achieve the same results today. I recently heard it said that The Sudan was administered for 50 years by a total of 200 British civil servants and soldiers and they provided the best government that the Sudanese have ever experienced. Does this and Easterlys comment about the West taking over the administration of certain basic services lead one to the conclusion that recolonization is the answer? No, at least for me. In fact, it might be that the government itself is not ready to take care of its own population. As said, development is not just about oneself tries to aid the other, its about the countries which received the aids as well. The aid and the government optimal action have to happen at the same time for growth to happen. 11. When Haiti became independent 200 years ago, it was producing fully 50% of the worlds coffee. Because coffee was the product of slave labor and imperial domination, the new government chose to dismantle the plantations and halt the growing of coffee. Might a similar radical reorganization of agriculture explain a few things? It might, in fact, hurt the country if it was their comparative advantage. According to the situation, it is clearly that Haiti has the comparative advantage over coffee. 12. There is a television show called Community, in which Betty White played the characters anthropology teacher. She disappears to the Democratic Republic of Congo after attacking two of her students and singing the praises of drinking her own urine. But that is completely unrelated to the question at hand. Are structural adjustments a meaningful advance in policy?

13. My friend Erin did her study abroad in Malawi. She graduated in 2010 with a degree in Architecture and spent her time in Africa helping to build a school. She came back with a story of how the principal was charging the students tuition even though the school was being funded by donors. In Uttar Pradesh (the largest province of India), it is estimated that 85% of all federal soft spending (education, health, etc) disappears between being appropriated by the central government and being spent on the ground. What do the facts say about how corruption happens and how we may be modeling it? Corruption might in fact take over the effects of the aids. In another word, corruption represents inefficiency when the aids are introduced. Corruption is in fact a portion in the inefficiency of the aids and by standard deviations. 14. Might better land titling have major positive effects in Africa? Could it change the behavior that Duflo observed regarding fertilizer usage? It might in some sense. Better land tilting might give the farmers a chance to learn the better technology or methodology from their neighbors. If we group a good farmer with three other farmers who dont know the method well together, we will be able to maximize the effects of fertilizers. 15. What do you make of Easterlys economic interpretation of civil wars, rebellions and genocide? Interventions to these matters can also be listed as transformational and marginal approaches. But as we do a collection of those marginal approached programs, we will be able to make the whole system change.