The ethics of New Development Economics: is the Experimental Approach to Development Economics morally wrong?

Abstract

The 2000s have witnessed the arrival and growing popularity of randomized controlled experiments (RCTs) in Development Economics. Whilst this new way of conducting research on development has unfolded important insights, the ethical challenge it provokes has not yet been systematically examined. The present article aims at filling this gap by providing the first ad hoc discussion of the moral issues that accompany the use of RCTs in Development Economics. Claiming that this new research agenda needs its own, specific set of ethical guidelines, we expose the six ethical problems that these experiments potentially provoke and that should therefore be carefully assessed by ethics committees before an RCT is launched and by scholarly journals before its results are published.

Experimental Design

“…In addition, for social interventions in particular, researchers regularly do not seek prior consent from their participants. Indeed, informed consent is considered to be impossible in large-scale social experiments (Baele 2013).…”

“…The reason is that an intervention needs to be perceived by the research participants as naturally occurring (Humphreys 2015). The argument is the same as the one that is used to justify deception; namely, ignorance prevents reactive behavior -Hawthorne effects, John Henry effects, and "looping effects" -that could threaten the scientific outcome by introducing bias (Hacking 1999;Baele 2013). In general, alternative forms of acceptable consent, on the one hand, are challenged on the basis of the methodological and epistemological aims of experimental design.…”

“…Indeed, if a treatment is readily available, then it may be offered to members of the control group after the experiment has concluded. However, if the treatment is beneficial, and if the claims to the treatment are significantly greater for the control group, then, by not ensuring a certain level of well-being for the worse-off group before maximizing the well-being of the treatment group, experimental interventions can violate the prioritarian moral principle (Baele 2013). Furthermore, social interventions tend to operate with relatively scarce resources such that treatments cannot be given to all who stand to benefit from them.…”

“…Although primarily epistemologically motivated, it carries extraordinary ethical weight (Worrall 2007). By randomly assigning participants to treatments and controls, experiments advantage some people and disadvantage others even though proponents of randomization tend to consider them to be equal (Baele 2013). Conner (1982) argues that such inequities are amplified in laboratory experiments because the participants of the control group are unlikely to receive the standard services available to them in the social world.…”

Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development

“…9 See , Grossman and Mackenzie (2005), Cartwright (2007), Ravallion (2009aRavallion ( ,b, 2012, Rodrik (2009), Barrett and Carter (2010), Deaton (2010a), Keane (2010), Baele (2013), Basu (2014), Mulligan (2014), Pritchett and Sandefur (2015), Favereau (2016), Ziliak and Teather-Posadas (2016), Hammer (2017), Deaton and Cartwright (2018), Gibson (2019), Pritchett (2020) and Young (2019).…”