JICA Project "School for All" in Burkina-Faso is Introduced at Asian Meeting of Econometric Society

During August 2-4, JICA-RI Visiting Fellow Yasuyuki Sawada (Professor of the University of Tokyo) joined the annual Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society, which is one of the most prestigious international economic societies worldwide, held at the National University of Singapore. He gave a presentation on the evaluation results of the project using public goods games that was implemented in association with the JICA project “School for All” in Burkina-Faso.

Visiting Fellow Sawada’s presentation* was made in the session entitled “Education and Development,” chaired by Professor Albert Park from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It was the only session where participants discussed empirical development microeoconomics.

Visiting Fellow Sawada introduced a new research strategy that evaluates overall School Based Management (SBM) on a large scale with Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), together with the degree of voluntary contributions to public goods elicited by an artefactual field experiment using “public goods games” as evaluation criteria. The presentation induced lively discussions among the session participants. During the same session, new RCT-based evaluation results of education experiments in China were also presented. The session gave the participating experts an opportunity to reaffirm the significance of creating and disseminating the evaluation results of development policies through precise measures and studies, employing the leading-edge method of analysis.

*The presentation was based on the JICA-RI Working Paper No.42 “Do Community-Managed Schools Facilitate Social Capital Accumulation? Evidence from the COGES Project in Burkina-Faso,” released in 2012.