The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy

Rating:
Summary: Misadventure
Review: It is a great book, and I would have not canceled the order if you would have shipped as your website said it would.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: This book is a masterpiece. In practice, it deserves to become the "Holy Bible" of Microeconometrics applied to (but not only to) Development Economics. It is beautifully written by an amazingly knowledgeble economist, who has actually worked for years (and still does) on most of the issues this book deals with. It is no easy reading, and it would be worth spending a day for every single page, but it's excellent even if you don't want to go through the details, and you just need an intuition about the issues covered. The first chapter introduces the reader to many important aspects of the contruction and use of household surveys. The second chapter masterfully reviews many concepts of applied econometrics. Chapter 3 is about poverty and inequality measurement. Chapter 4 is about "Nutrition, children, and intrahousehold allocation", Chapter 5 deals with prices and tax reforms, and Chapter 6 with saving and consumption smoothing. The book also contains many useful Stata codes the author wrote and used for his many papers. Again, this is not a trivial reading, but if you are interested in applied economics you will find reading this book extremely rewarding, and often almost entertaining, because Deaton is one of the very few economists around able to write about technical stuff in a brilliant and intuitive way.