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Beyond Experiments in Development Economics:

Local Economy-wide Impact Evaluation

This book provides researchers, students, and practitioners with a methodology to evaluate the impacts of a wide diversity of development projects and policies on local economies. Projects and policies often create spillovers within project areas. LEWIE uses simulation methods to quantify these spillovers. It has become a complement to randomized control trials (RCTs), as governments and donors become interested in documenting impacts beyond the treated, comparing the likely impacts of alternative interventions, and designing complementary interventions to influence program and policy impacts. It is also a tool for impact evaluation where RCTs are not feasible.

Chapters 1-4 motivate and present the basics of impact simulation, including how to design a LEWIE model, how to estimate the model, and how to obtain the necessary data. The remaining chapters provide a diversity of interesting real-world applications and extensions of the basic models. The applications include evaluations of the impacts of cash transfers for the poor, ecotourism, global food-price shocks, irrigation projects, migration, and corruption.  Each chapter provides readers with the tools they need to conduct their own local economy-wide impact evaluations. 

About the authors: 

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J. Edward Taylor

Ed is a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California in Davis.  His research in the fields of Development Economics, Migration Economics, Labor Economics, and Economy-wide Modeling has been published in the most prominent academic journals and earned him numerous awards. He is a Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Learn more about Ed here

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Mateusz Filipski

Mateusz is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA) and a Non-Resident Fellow at the International Food Policy Institute.  He conducts research on issues of rural poverty worldwide and policy evaluation.  


Learn more about Mateusz here.

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