Why can’t well-trained statisticians answer these questions?, the somewhat churlish theoretically-minded economist might ask. Why do we need economists, who are supposed, at the very least, to combine two observations to form a deduction? The answer, at one level, is very simple and not overly supportive of the churlish theorist’s complaint. While the questions are straightforward, the answers are often extremely difficult to tease out from the data, and you need a well-trained economist, not a statistician, to understand the difficulty and eliminate it. Because of the aforementioned econometric issues, not a single one of the questions asked above admit a straightforward answer. Development economists spend a lot of time thinking of inventive ways to get around these problems, and it is no small feat of creativity, dedication and extremely hard work to pull off a convincing solution.