Alex Armand, a University of Navarra researcher, received scholarships from the Ramón Areces Foundation and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). With them, he will begin two studies on developing countries that focus on investment in education and the transparent management of natural resources. Alex Armand is a member of the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID), a project within the Institute for Culture and Society.

With the help of the Ramon Areces Foundation, Armand will carry out a project entitled, "Towards an understanding of parental expectations of educational returns in developing countries."

Through this study, he seeks to understand how parents of low-income households form subjective expectations about the benefits of schooling for their children— i.e., possibilities for future income— how these expectations evolve over time and whether they explain future educational decisions.

Analyzing imbalance in Mozambique

The grant from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) will go toward funding a project entitled, "On the mechanics of the political resource curse: Information and local elite behavior in Mozambique," which the NCID researcher has developed together with Pedro Vicente of the Nova University of Lisbon (Portugal).

The initiative will examine what has caused economic imbalance in Mozambique, which, despite being a country with a wealth of natural resources, is one of the world's poorest nations. To do this, Armand will analyze how information on natural resource management influences the behavior of the country's elites and citizens.

The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) is an international organization that provides grants to promote policies and programs based on empirical evidence in countries with low and middle income. Its main sources of funding come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation UKaid, through the Department of International Development and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.