Can Randomized Controlled Trials be a Discovery Process?

Trends in development economics have led randomized controlled trials to be a popular method for investigating a variety of questions in developing economies. This chapter weighs significant arguments that RCTs are one of the best tools for program evaluation against criticisms of their internal and external validity. To resolve these debates, it then turns to discuss the implicit political economy of the process described by the 2019 Nobel Prize winners.

Finally, to satisfy these and other institutional prerequisites for experimentation in a developing society to be productive, it argues that embedding RCTs and other forms of experimentation in a civil society is more likely to produce improvements in human wellbeing than embedding RCTs in a developmental state.