Experiments in Economics and their Ethical Dimensions: the Case of Developing Countries

Experiments have become widespread in mainstream economics, being viewed as a particularly rigorous method, especially ‘field experiments', including randomised controlled trials (RCTs). This expansion of experimental methods raises questions of an epistemological nature - notably regarding the validity of an extension of results and causalities from the experiment to wider scales -, but also of an ethical nature. Yet the ethical dimensions of the use of experiments by economists remain under-investigated, though they constitute crucial issues, as experiments are presented as providing results that are not only more ‘true' in terms of scientificity, but also more ‘relevant' for policymakers. These ethical issues are particularly crucial in developing countries, where experiments have become widely utilised, their results viewed as guides for policymaking and resource allocation that would be more rigorous than all other methods. The paper thus analyses field experiments in developing countries, including randomised control trials, and argues that these experiments raise many issues. Firstly, these issues are epistemological and simultaneously ethical, as the ontological framework of experiments is utilitarianism and a conception of persons as individualists who rationally respond to inputs such as policy variations in isolation from social or political contexts. Secondly, these issues are ethical because experiments aim to guide policymaking. Developing countries are characterised by dependence on donors' financing, with designers of experiments being often from donor countries, which underscores the importance of the ethical choices of the economists who devise experiments.