I’m going to be writing a few papers on a particular low-income country for a global economic development class I’m going to be taking. Here are the topics
I’d like it to be relevant for people in EA, so if anyone is interested in answers to the above about a particular country or policy, but doesn’t have the time to do the research for themselves, let me know.
You could try doing something relevant to one of the charities founded under Charity Entrepreneurship. They often advocate or implement practical and widely-recommended policy solutions within specific low-income countries. There’s one charity working on reducing lead exposure for children, and another trying to improve vaccination rates against preventable diseases. You could reach out to the founders, learn which countries they’re considering working in next, write a general profile of poverty with specific focus on their target problem, advocate their policy or analyze their options within that country, and provide them a stakeholder roadmap for getting the policy effectively implemented. Charity Entrepreneurship also has a big list of ideas they’re waiting for more people to tackle, so you could talk with CE about fleshing out some of those proposals.
https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/our-charities
Thanks! I’ll ask them!
I’m from the lead exposure charity mentioned (LEEP: https://leadelimination.org/) - if banning lead paint counts as urban development then feel free to email me clare@leadelimination.org—we can definitely suggest some countries we’re beginning work in.
I will find out if it does!
I have a Gdoc here (‘Appendices to “The case against randomista development”’) where I rank countries as a function of population, poverty (GDP per capita) to get at the importance and neglectedness of improving their economic policy proxied by their ranking on the World Banks Doing Business ranking. The ranking is below.
But this didn’t include tractability. Also from a longtermist perspective some people say that India is probably going to be the most important country, due to its population size, democracy, scalability, and so on.
$868
79M
147
115,637
183
0.21
24,380
$1,734
102M
74
75,285
159
0.09
6,903
$1,216
29M
105
30,224
138
0.11
3,430
$3,580
163M
36
58,025
168
0.05
2,723
$6,574
1B
19
256,777
63
0.01
2,461
$1,819
41M
70
29,076
116
0.06
1,854
$5,238
193M
24
47,021
108
0.02
970
$5,861
186M
22
40,454
131
0.02
904
$15,531
1B
8
113,162
31
0.00
226