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Happy new year!
As 2024 kicks into gear, we have started the year with eight articles and the first two episodes of Season 4 of VoxDevTalks. We are super excited about what we have planned for this year and proud of what we achieved during 2023 - check out the 2023 at VoxDev blog for a summary.
Our first VoxDevLit of 2024 reviews evidence on the labour market barriers faced by jobseekers and firms in low and lower-middle income countries and how these can be addressed. Senior Editors Stefano Caria and Kate Orkin will join us at the launch event for this living literature review on Monday February 5th to outline the key takeaways for policymakers - sign up here.
In this article, Jacob Moscona and Awa Ambra Seck explore how the social structure of communities shape economic interactions and the impacts of policy. They focus on Uganda and Kenya to compare financial ties amongst communities with "age sets" to kin-based societies. In societies with age sets, the primary social unit is often a group of individuals who are of similar age and initiated into adulthood at the same time. As outlined in the article, this influences the spillover effects of cash transfers and pension programmes, and also has more fundamental implications for inequality and vulnerability in society.
Millions of people rely on informal self-employment for their livelihoods despite policymakers' efforts to create stable salaried jobs. In last week's article, Francesco Amodio, Pamela Medina and Monica Morlacco explore the role of labour market power – specifically, the ability of employers to suppress wages below competitive levels - on the enduring prevalence of self-employment and the lack of employment at large firms in Peru. They demonstrate that labour market power hinders development by suppressing wage employment and also fostering a dependence on self-employment that undermines the effectiveness of policies aiming to boost wages and wage employment.
Under South Africa’s system of apartheid, black families were forced to move and live in homeland areas characterised by poor sanitary and physical infrastructure conditions, separated from the white minority. In this article, Bladimir Carrillo, Carlos Charris and Wilman Iglesias explores the extent to which this apartheid policy negatively impacted educational attainment, and shows that this occurred primarily through changing early childhood environments.
Wednesday's article explores the importance of implementation in explaining differences across settings of the estimated effects of similar education interventions. Noam Angrist and Rachael Meager find that implementation metrics explain most of the variation in the effects of targeted instruction programmes in different studies, playing a key role in generalisability. This highlights the importance of quantifying programme implementation with as much care as we quantify programme effects.
Governments in the world’s poorest countries face severe revenue constraints. They collect only 10% of GDP in taxes compared to 40% in rich countries. In yesterday's article, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek and Jonathan Weigel explore how governments can maximise tax revenues in areas with low state capacity. Using an experiment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they find that reducing tax rates increases tax revenues when enforcement capacity is low. However, low-capacity states can invest in tax enforcement to shift up the revenue-maximising tax rate.
Today's article also explores how taxes work in areas with low state capacity. Evan Plous Kresch, Mark Walker, Michael Carlos Best, Francois Gerard and Joana Naritomi focus on the behaviour of residents in Manaus, Brazil, and find that a household’s access to the urban sanitation network can have a significant impact on whether it pays its taxes. The “social contract” - where citizens pay taxes in exchange for the state providing basic services - plays a significant role in households deciding whether to pay their property taxes.
Financial incentives are believed to be a key policy tool to improve the quality of bureaucracies and public service delivery, yet there is little evidence on how incentives should be allocated across the layers of hierarchy at large organisations. Tuesday's article explores incentives in the context of Sierra Leone’s National Community Health Worker Program which is run by Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health and Sanitation. Stefano Caria, Erika Deserranno, Gianmarco León-Ciliotta and Philipp Kastrau find that a shared performance incentive scheme for health workers and their supervisors improved productivity and health outcomes and was more effective than paying the incentive to only one group
Billions of people are affected by water scarcity, so how can policymakers promote water conservation effectively? On Monday, Sebastian Tonke outlined evidence from Namibia which shows that providing a short list of specific saving strategies reduced water consumption by 5% while simply raising awareness and asking households to find their own strategies was ineffective. This article demonstrates that interventions which focus on raising awareness or appealing to environmental consciousness – without giving specific, actionable, and salient advice on how to change – can fail to affect behaviour.
On the podcast, in our first episode of 2024 we discussed fair and efficient ways to improve not just access to education, but outcomes too. Should policymakers focus on a broader markets and systems approach to education reform? Emiliana Vegas and Asim Khwaja told us what a markets and systems approach to delivering education reform is, and what it has already achieved in Pakistan and Chile.
We also covered how place-based policy works, and what can it deliver. Gordon Hanson has spent many years studying the economic importance of where people live, and what policy can do to improve those places. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Gordon talks to Tim Phillips about what has historically succeeded and failed in US cities, and how that knowledge can be applied elsewhere.
At the end of 2023 I wrote a blog post outlining some of the ways in which VoxDev can be used by students and teachers at universities. As students return to university, check out how VoxDev can be used as an educational resource here.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's articles and podcast, featuring research on early childhood interventions, urban poverty, industrial policy, court capture, and intergenerational health effects.
Oliver Hanney, Managing Editor