Morning Briefing

Following controversy surrounding a study published in the Lancet earlier this month that examined the impact of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) on child mortality, "both the authors of the paper and the journal itself have finally responded," blogger Matt Collin writes in the Aid Thoughts blog and provides a link to the post in the World Bank's "Development Impact" blog that began the debate. The blog notes that study author Paul Pronyk of the Earth Institute, in a letter (.pdf) to the Lancet, retracts the child mortality data in the study and accepts that mathematical errors highlighted in the "Development Impact" post were made (5/18). In the Roving Bandit blog, blogger Lee Crawfurd discusses the Lancet editors' response (.pdf) and writes, "There are definitely lessons to be learned across [the medical and economic] disciplines both ways. It's just an incredibly sad state of affairs that one of the lessons that journals of medicine, the discipline that gave us randomized controlled trials, needs to learn from economics, is a more careful attention to statistics and causality" (5/21). In a post in the Christian Science Monitor's "Africa Monitor" blog, blogger Tom Murphy summarizes the controversy and writes, "The discussion is important, say the critics, because of the popularity and cost of the MVP" (5/23).