William M. Bowen

Zhenhua Chen

Dale Whittington

This book examines major policy and planning issues in development studies from the regional science perspective. It investigates questions such as: “How are communities able to deal with uncertainties raised by conflicts, technology, and external shocks in the process of development?”; “How can nations achieve sustainable development in terms of resource allocation and management?”; and “How can developing countries improve their economic competitiveness while maintaining the objectives of equitable and coordinated growth among different regions?” using case studies that focus on different subfields, like infrastructure, environment, data science, sustainability and resilience. The book is organized in three parts. Part I clarifies fundamental issues regarding development studies and regional science in general, while Part II includes several case studies that address development-related opportunities and challenges with a focus on Asian countries. Lastly, Part III offers a global perspective and explores development experiences from countries throughout the world. Featuring contributions by leading academics and practitioners working at various organizations linked to international development, and including multidisciplinary analyses, the book appeals to students who are interested in development studies and regional science. It also offers planners and policymakers fresh insights into regional economic development.

Essays in Honor of Kingsley E. Haynes

Development Studies in Regional Science

W. Michael Hanemann

Claudia Sadoff

The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries shows the key to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover forms of service and payment mechanisms that will render the improvements worthwhile for those who must pay for them. However for any investment, the outcome is likely to be context-dependent -- the outcome depends on economic and social conditions, including how it is implemented, by whom, and to what extent complementary changes - in behavior, in institutions, and sometimes in economic organization - also occur. The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries is organized in three parts. Part I focuses on conventional network technologies for water supply and sanitation. Part II presents the probabilistic analytical approach that we use to analyze investments in the water and sanitation sector. In Part III we deploy this analytical framework to examine the costs and benefits of three specific low-cost, non-network water and sanitation interventions (deep boreholes with public handpumps, total community-led sanitation campaigns, and biosand filters) and one high-cost intervention (large multipurpose dams in Africa).

The Challenge of Improving Water and Sanitation Services in Less Developed Countries

Duncan MacRae Jr.

Economic reasoning has thus far dominated the field of public policy analysis. This new introduction to the field posits that policy analysis should have both a broader interdisciplinary base—including criteria from such fields as political science, sociology, law, and philosophy, as well as economics—and also a broader audience in order to foster democratic debate. To achieve these goals, MacRae and Whittington have organized their textbook around the construction of decision matrices using multiple criteria, exploring the uses of the decision matrix formulation more fully than other texts. They describe how to set up the matrix, fill in cells and combine criteria, and use it as an aid for decision making. They show how ethical assessment of the affects that alternatives have on various parties differs from political analysis, and then they extend the use of the decision matrix to consider alternatives by affected parties, periods of time, or combined factors. The authors also thoughtfully address the role of expert advice in the policy process, widening the scope of the field to describe a complex system for the creation and use of knowledge in a democracy. An extended case study of HIV/AIDS policy follows each chapter (in installments), immediately illustrating the application of the material. The book also contains a glossary. Expert Advice for Policy Choice provides a new basis for graduate education in public policy analysis and can also serve as a text in planning, evaluation research, or public administration. In addition, it will be of interest to students and professionals wishing to aid policy choice who work in such fields as sociology, political science, psychology, public health, and social work.

Dale Whittington

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