This week we featured research on robots, profit shifting, HIV, training and more...
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Our next webinar, a collaboration with J-PAL on tracking impact in development, is taking place on Tuesday April 8th at 1pm UK time. Paddy Carter, Aparna Krishnan and Arianna Legovini will discuss how development organisations can track their impact - register here. We also released a Spanish Translation of our recent VoxDevLit - Refugiados y otras poblaciones desplazadas por la fuerza.
Robot adoption has skyrocketed in China in the last decade. Osea Giuntella, Yi Lu and Tianyi Wang explore how this exposure has led to a decline in employment and wages, influencing workers’ training and retirement decisions.
Despite the increased access to primary education in sub-Saharan Africa, secondary school enrolment and completion remains low. In yesterday’s article, Douglas Kazibwe and Jinhu Li reveal that universal secondary school policies can play a transformative role in women’s empowerment.
Vocational training has long been seen as a solution to unemployment and poverty, but it may not be the silver bullet policymakers once thought it was. In this episode of Development Dialogues, Oriana Bandiera, Stefano Caria, and Munshi Sulaiman tackle pressing questions around evidence, expectations, market realities, and coordination challenges in designing skills-based interventions for employment.
Official records may have painted an overly bleak picture of vaccination progress in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Yannick Markhof finds that vaccine coverage progressed faster than previously thought.
Despite the high HIV prevalence in Malawi, individuals do not seem to adjust their behaviour to avoid infection—this may be due to the perceived transmission risk being so high that people become fatalistic, assuming they are doomed to HIV infection no matter what. Jason Kerwin demonstrates that providing information on actual—often lower—transmission rates can help curb risky sexual behaviours. The implications of such interventions are significant given recent cuts to health aid programmes worldwide.
Similarly, in Malawi, Alberto Ciancio, Fabrice Kämpfen, Hans-Peter Kohler, and Rebecca Thornton explore how knowing one’s HIV status can be fatal when there are no treatment options available.
Transfer mispricing—the practice in which multinationals shift profits to subsidiaries in tax havens—disproportionately harms developing countries. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Ludvig Wier discusses what tools low-capacity governments can use to identify these cases of tax evasion, and to what extent global corporate tax policies help curb evasion.
When a family member becomes disabled, individuals become more risk averse—a finding with significant implications for policies that address poverty and vulnerability in disability-affected households. Jan Priebe, Ute Rink, and Henry Stemmler outline research on disability-related risk preferences in Vietnam.
In today’s article, Juanita Bloomfield, Ana Balsa, Alejandro Cid, and Philip Oreopoulos provide evidence from a phone-based intervention in Uruguay, which included access to an AI chatbot, demonstrates how behavioural insights can enhance parenting practices and improve early childhood development at scale.
How does disaster response work at a government level? Bhishma Kumar Bhusal reflects on his experience managing Nepal’s earthquake recovery efforts and the lessons he learned.
Elsewhere in development economics, like at VoxDev, it has been a busy week. First we wanted to highlight the new online Development Economics Course, by Oriana Bandiera and Robin Burgess, free to all residents of a large group of African and Asian countries.
On US tariffs:
- On VoxEU, Simon Evenett and Johannes Fritz write about how US reciprocal tariffs are upending global trade policy.
- On TradeTalks, Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes are joined by an all-star cast to discuss Trump's tariff day and its implications on a range of factors.
- On CGDEV, Brian Webster and Charles Kenny highlight that these tariffs will impact developing countries the most, and Karen Mathiasen and Nico Martinez write about the impacts of US tariffs on Africa.
To watch:
- You can catch up on the Growth Research Platform's (CEPR) Workshop on Investing for Structural Transformation in Africa.
- From CSAE, listen to James Robinson and Stefan Dercon in conversation. Lee Crawfurd has summarised the papers presented at the CSAE conference here.
- Akinwumi Adesina, outgoing president of the African Development Bank Group, told the BBC why Africa can't rely on the benevolence of others.
Other interesting reading:
- Dev Patel has created an amazing new website based on his work detecting floods.
- "Coding sweatshops don't stand a chance against AI." Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan outline what India must do to respond to AI here.
- Ken Opalo writes "The problem of organizing weak states; and why Africa needs a new model of Pan-Africanism".
- Grieve Chelwa writes - Ending Aid Dependency: The Tax Edition.
- John Mundy outlines why development needs to find ways to win.
- How is GiveWell responding to the USAID Funding Cuts.
- Charles Kenny - World Bank Procurement Rules and Chinese Contractors.
Other opportunities/announcements:
- 3ie announced their new Remotely Sensed Indicators for Development platform.
- Eva Vivalt is hiring pre-doctoral fellows to work on interesting topics.
- Applications open for the CERP Management Training Program.