Week of April 5, 2019

1. Financial Inclusion: It's an "interesting" time in the world of financial inclusion, in the sense of that (apocryphal?) Chinese curse. There are arguments on whether to change the name of the "sector" accurately reflects the goals, the funding environment is uncertain, digital financial services are shifting business models and regulatory frameworks--all also indications that there is important convergence between "developed" and "developing" countries. But most importantly there are questions about whether the results from the work of the last 40 years (a rough approximation of the modern microfinance movement globally, and the asset-building movement in the US) justify further investment. 
You can see the tensions in two recent posts at Next Billion: first, Leora Klapper on the importance of investment in financial inclusion to meet the SDGs; and a fiery response from Phil Mader and Maren Duvendack, authors of the Campbell Collaborative/3ie "systematic review of reviews" that I've likely mentioned a couple of times. But the "interesting" times also explain, at least in part, the raft of other evidence reviews of various sorts that are appearing (IPA, Dvara, UNCDF/BFA,Caribou Digital, CGAP). It's enough to get you to buy into Lant Pritchett's dictum that RCTs are "weapons against the weak."
CGAP asked me to write something about all this--and to do it in under 1000 words. You can guess how well that went, given that the summary for the evidence review I've been working on for CDC is more than 10 pages (you should also read that as an acknowledgement of a specific conflict of interest when it comes to talking about evidence reviews). Anyway, the final result is here. The bottom line is that I'm skeptical of what can be learned from systematic reviews--channeling some other Pritchett-thought on where policy-relevant insights come from.
By the way, if you're skeptical of the point about most interventions struggling to show meaningful impact, here's a new paper making the case that TB public health interventions in the early 20th century had little to do with declining TB-mortality; and here's a paper from the education sector so frustrated that they can't find evidence of impact that they propose doing away with credible large-scale impact evaluations. And here's an open letter to a hypothetical education minister with some useful statistics on how little learning happens in schools in most of the world.
  
2. Global Productivity: Plenty has been written about stagnant wages, slow growth, and rising inequality in developed countries (if you're based in the US, it might not be apparent that this is a global phenomenon, but it is.) But there's another important phenomenon that hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness nearly as much, probably because the impact isn't as immediately apparent: there's a global productivity slowdown. That's a problem because rising incomes come from growth, and growth comes from productivity gains.
Here's a new paper from Gordon and Sayed documenting the trans-Atlantic trend in slowing productivity, and how closely European productivity growth (or lack thereof) has mirrored that of the US, with a time lag. Their thesis is that the slowdown is related to a "retardation in technical change."
That probably sounds odd given that I know about the paper and you are reading about the paper on using technologies that were essentially unfathomable in 1980. But overall economic dynamism, including technical change has actually slowed dramatically since the post-war years. And there's emerging evidence that there is a single cause for all of these issues: the aging of the population. 
It's a fascinating thesis that makes a lot of intuitive sense, and there is growing evidence for it from lots of different directions. I'm sure there will be lots more papers on this in the years ahead, but in the meantime it suggests a few interesting thoughts: a) China has a big problem coming, and b) future productivity growth is going to come from India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and c) we all have legitimate reasons to worry about millennials not having sex.  

3. (Mostly US) Household Finance: I'm going to open with an acknowledgment of severe cognitive dissonance related to item 1 above: my work reviewing evidence on investment in financial inclusion and financial systems, and reviewing others reviews, has changed my perspective on what is learned from such reviews. But one of my long-standing hobby horses is railing against financial literacy because of the lack of evidence that it accomplishes anything and systematic reviews that it accomplishes essentially nothing. So now as I read stories like this about more and more states in the US requiring financial literacy as a condition of high school graduation, not only do I get raging mad, but I also have to battle against my own arguments on how to understand research. To be clear, my perspective hasn't changed--current financial literacy programs are a waste of time and money. But I am more sanguine about investing in figuring out ways to provide meaningful financial literacy. 
Tying everything so far together, here's an article from SSIR on the "cost of financial precarity" which includes reduced worker productivity, suggests why financial literacy training doesn't work (it's about the wrong things) and argues for why investment in "financial well-being" (a phrase that's part of the debate over what to call financial inclusion now) is important. And here's a newish JPMorganChase Institute piece on another part of why financial literacy is about the wrong things: how families manage tax refunds and payments. 
For those interested in going deeper to understand to understand what is happening in the US families' finances over time, the Federal Reserve Board has created an amazing new dataset: Distributional Financial Accounts. They use a "more comprehensive measure of household wealth" and provide data quarterly to track wealth distribution. By the way, the early findings are quite consistent with the story of aging population driving asset accumulation among older and wealthier parts of the population.
How does wealth concentration happen in the US? It's not just inheritance. Ager, Boustan and Eriksson have a new paper looking at how wealthy slave-owning families quickly recovered their position at the top of the economic ladder after Emancipation, in economic terms a huge negative wealth shock. If you'd like the summary version, here's WaPo coverage of the paper with some interesting details on the work required to find and link 1800's data to track cross-generational outcomes. And before leaving the US, one more thing to tie all this together one more time. Here's a piece that leads with the idea that there are steps that individuals can take to do something about income and wealth inequality, but the ideas really are either the kind of things that are in financial literacy curricula around personal actions that don't lead to meaningful changes in outcomes, or actually systemic changes not individual actions. 
Finally, I'm going to shift gears radically to another part of household finance: intra-household bargaining. Here's a cool new paper that looks at the levels of cooperation, trust, altruism and transactional behavior in polygynous households (of note, 80% of authors are women). 

4. Bank (and other financial services) Behavior: More discouraging to me than any impact evaluation, or systematic review of impact evaluations, finding modest impact are stories about the behavior of banks and financial services firms. Walk with me on the mostly dark side for a while. 
A few weeks ago I covered the scandal in Australian banking after a government commission found widespread predatory behavior by banks. Fifty leading economists in Australia were surveyed about whether something could be done--they unanimously agreed that something could be done, but a substantial minority seem to think major changes are required (e.g. replacing Australian regulators with foreigners!). If Australian regulators are hopelessly compromised, what hope dodeveloping countries like Uganda have of maintaining regulator independence?
Sometimes the regulators do the right thing. Like reporting blatant attempts at bribery by the CEO of an insurance conglomerate looting its assets to fund his other businesses. But much of the bad behavior isn't really under the control of regulators.It's culture, and cultures don't change easily. That's not just a statement about Wells Fargo and unsavory behavior. Here's a new paper about how organizational culture at Indian banks inhibits the adoption of beneficial innovations that reduce the costs of borrowing.
How do the bad actors get away with it. It turns out that consumers enable some of the bad behavior by simply not paying attention. For instance consumers in the UKwon't pay enough attention to savings account disclosures that would allow them to save 123 pounds in the first year. Sigh. 

5. Procrastination: Perhaps the most important thing that I have ever linked to in the faiV: Procrastination isn't about laziness or self-control. And that's why the faiV is so late so often.