Indian states are testing a new way of setting development priorities
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The Economist discusses a development path forward for India, highlighting our latest research findings.
What if, instead of promoting favoured schemes, Indian governments instead challenged experts to propose the cleverest interventions they could think of? What if they then got economists to calculate, as objectively and scientifically as possible, their likely cost-benefit ratios? And what if they then compared these numbers and adopted policies based on which projects promised the biggest bang for the buck?
This, in essence, is the approach that the governments of two of India’s 36 states and territories are now considering. The model being used in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, with funding from the Tata Trusts, a charity, was developed by a Danish economist, Bjørn Lomborg, and tested in countries such as Haiti and Bangladesh."