This week we featured research on trade wars, economic development, gender inequality and more...
Sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter and updates on our upcoming VoxDevLit launch events straight to your inbox.
We are really excited for next week's event (Tuesday January 28th) which will focus on using evidence to make humanitarian aid more effective. Register here for this free online webinar.
Contrary to the Pollution Haven hypothesis, air quality did not deteriorate in Vietnamese cities where urban economic growth has been most rapid. Today's article focuses on Vietnam's experience during the US-China trade war to show how Vietnam decoupled growth from environmental degradation. Matthew E. Kahn, Wen-Chi Liao and Siqi Zheng explore lessons for other developing countries looking to promote economic growth and reduce emissions.
Paying landowners to conserve their forested land is a leading approach to prevent deforestation. Wednesday's article presents evidence from Mexico which shows that smarter contract design can more than quadruple cost-effectiveness. Santiago Izquierdo-Tort, Seema Jayachandran and Santiago Saavedra find that requiring full enrolment in a PES programme reduces landowners’ ability to enroll only those parcels they were already going to conserve.
The global environment for development has changed, so development policies should change too. In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Francesco Caselli and Tim Dobermann look back at their predictions from a series of blogs on IGC in 2018, and discuss what the current geopolitical situation means for future growth policy.
The differential impact of parenthood on the employment of mothers relative to fathers – the child penalty – is a universal phenomenon, but with varying magnitudes. On Monday, Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante presented evidence across 134 countries which shows that typically, as countries grow wealthier, child penalties take over as the dominant driver of gender inequality.
Women in Mexico who switched to digital cash transfers face higher costs and time accessing payments but gain bargaining power. Fernanda Marquez-Padilla & Susan W. Parker show that, to mitigate these challenges, governments can improve ATM access, reduce fees, provide timely information on the date of transfers and boost financial literacy.
Subsidised access to full-day preschools in Uganda had long-term positive effects on children’s anthropometrics but not their learning outcomes. Arne Nasgowitz, Denise Ferris, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Lore Vandewalle, Selim Guleschi and Vincent Somville show that cash transfers of a similar value as the preschool subsidy had a similar impact.
On Tuesday, Oriana Bandiera, Niklas Buehren, Markus Goldstein, Imran Rasul and Andrea Smurra updated their earlier VoxDev article. They find that an empowerment programme in Sierra Leone that supported girls through a simple life skills and livelihood training buffered adolescent girls from the adverse effects of the Ebola crisis.
Elsewhere in development economics:
- On India: Anant Sudarshan joined the Ideas of India podcast; a LinkedIn newsletter - IndiaLog by Shreya Shende - on India public policy; a new blog called The Plank which features a story on India each week; and Ashwini Deshpande wrote on VoxEU about structural change and gender in India.
- On Global Developments by Oliver Kim - No, South Korea Was Not Poorer Than Kenya in 1960.
- On BII, Paddy Carter and Steven Ayres discuss jobs, development, and climbing the ladder.
- Ahead of the International Day of Education on January 24th, the World Bank's second edition of Research Insights brings you a curated selection of studies addressing critical areas of education policy, with evidence spanning both global and country levels.
- Luca Braghieri and Sarah Eichmeyer outline how history education shapes support for extreme ideology on VoxEU.
- On the Guardian, Nilima Gulrajani and Jessica Pudussery discuss whether we have reached 'peak aid'.
- JPAL have a lovely collection of resources on their work in 2024, and plans for the future.
- On Artificial Intelligence: Transforming learning in Nigeria; Anton Korinek's latest update shows how LLMs have learned to collaborate and reason; Iqbal Dhaliwal & Michael Hou write about using AI for social good; and CEPR have announced a new webinar series on the economics of AI.
On that note, there are lots of other great events to register for over the coming weeks:
- The programme for the CSAE Conference (23 - 25 March) is out now, more details here.
- CGDEV have two interesting events in February: The Global Economy in 2025 & Official Development Assistance at a Crossroads.
- The Wheeler Institute for Business and Development is hosting a webinar on the role of private enterprises in colonising sub-Saharan Africa.
Plus the following opportunities have been announced:
- The Finance & Entrepreneurship Theme of the PEDL programme invites submissions for a workshop on AI, Finance, and Entrepreneurship to be held in person on June 16-18 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya.
- The Agri-SME Evidence Fund, funded by Aceli Africa and hosted within the International Growth Centre, has an open call for proposals focusing on the themes of agriculture, finance, and SMEs.