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It's been a busy week here at VoxDev with four articles, a podcast, and our new website going live. While it largely looks similar, we added a separate blog feature where I will add this weekly newsletter along with some other posts summarising our content. We also updated the topics, splitting some which were too broad and adding new topics for fast-growing areas of research - as a result of this some of our URL's for past articles have changed, so if a link is not working it is likely that the article has changed topics. The main purpose of updating the website was to give us more flexibility moving forward, particularly with our growing library of VoxDevLits, which we are super excited to add to next week with the Land Transport Infrastructure review. Don't forget to register here for the launch event on Tuesday December 5th.
This VoxDevLit summarises research on the impacts of investments in land transport infrastructure like the work outlined Monday's article, which explores the effects of a programme constructing new rural roads in India. Sumit Agarwal, Abhiroop Mukherjee and Lakshmi Naaraayanan show that the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana programme increased bank lending, particularly to previously excluded communities, and that this new financing was put towards productive uses.
This week's podcast is a fascinating discussion with Rocco Macchiavello and Julia Cajal Grossi, who talk through what they have learned from research on Global Value Chains (GVCs) in developing countries. GVCs now account for almost half of global trade and there is a growing consensus that they have helped foster growth in developing countries. In this longer format episode, Julia and Rocco discuss the costs and benefits of participation in GVCs, focusing on insights from research on coffee and garment supply chains. In these supply chains relationships between producers and buyers are crucial, and exist outside of the typical contractual environment assumed in Econ101.
The #metoo movement underscored that decision-makers in organisations often lack understanding of the scale and nature of harassment, which makes it challenging to formulate effective policy responses. In Tuesday's article, Laura Boudreau, Sylvain Chassang, Ada Gonzalez-Torres and Rachel Heath present their work seeking to better understand the prevalence of harassment by using a novel survey method at a large Bangladeshi apparel producer. This "hard garbling" method provides plausible deniability to workers reporting harassment in organisations and increased reported levels of threatening behaviour, physical harassment, and sexual harassment.
A pervasive politician-developer nexus exists in Indian cities, where politicians receive illicit financial support from real estate developers in exchange for favourable building policies and accelerated approvals. This "quid pro quo" facilitates the flow of "black money" — income hidden from tax authorities — into campaign coffers. In Thursday's article, Vaidehi Tandel, Sahil Gandhi and Alex Tabarrok reveal these quid pro quo arrangements by looking at political turnover and the completion times of real estate projects in Mumbai.
India, with 40% of its workforce employed in the agriculture sector, has experienced an increased incidence, duration and intensity of droughts over the last century. Climate change is increasing rainfall uncertainty and in today's article, Farzana Afridi, Kanika Mahajan and Nikita Sangwan show that this has gendered impacts on rural labour markets. After droughts, women are less likely to access non-farm employment through migration than men, exacerbating existing occupational gender gaps. As discussed in our recent podcast, understanding how different communities and demographics will be impacted by climate change is crucial for designing effective adaptation strategies - also see our VoxDevLit on Climate Adaptation for a broader summary.
With COP28 now underway, I would highly recommend our recent podcast with Bard Harstad who discusses how countries coordinate international climate action, drawing on his research on the 1997 Kyoto Protocal and 2015 Paris Agreement. Today also marks World Aids Day. When going through and checking our articles had migrated properly to the new website, I came across this previous article by Jeremy Greenwood, Philipp Kircher, Cezar Santos and Michele Tertilt, who explore the reasons behind Malawi's relative success in fighting HIV. They seek to disentangle whether the falling prevalence rate since 1999 is a result of anti-retroviral therapy policy or information access that induces sexual behavioural change.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's content featuring research on son preference in India, building better prisons, financial aid and social mobility, micro to macro development, optimal transport networks, and our new VoxDevLit!
Oliver Hanney, Managing Editor