Disaster relief can discourage people from adapting to future disasters – for example, by reducing incentives to relocate. But in low-income settings, cash relief can also ease liquidity constraints and enable adaptation. Evidence from Pakistan’s 201...
Indonesia’s non-tariff import measures – particularly inspections, import approvals, and port restrictions – significantly weakened exporters’ ability to adjust to China’s yuan depreciation by constraining their access to cheaper intermediate inputs...
Investments in early education can generate strong long-run human-capital and demographic gains in middle-income countries. New evidence shows that Argentina’s large-scale expansion of pre-primary education in the 1990s substantially increased comple...
Evidence from Senegal shows that teenage girls spend less time on caregiving and complete more years of education after the death of an elderly household member, indicating that the burden of caring for dependent relatives affects girls’ schooling.
In Brazil, legalising outsourcing of security to specialised firms reduced hiring frictions, boosting formal jobs for young men, but came at a large and lasting cost to older guards in previously well-paid jobs.
New evidence from Chile finds that in-situ slum upgrading – combining physical infrastructure improvements with the formalisation of land tenure within the slum – delivers larger gains in local economic development, both within treated slums and in s...
Prioritising women in collective bargaining led unions to expand female-friendly workplace amenities, increasing women’s retention and productivity without reducing wages, employment, or firm profits.
High-speed rail expansion in China boosted agricultural productivity, enabling labour and land to be reallocated from agriculture without reducing agricultural output.
In rural India, roads and electricity complement each other, with their joint provision delivering far greater gains in dry-season agricultural productivity, assets, and consumption than either investment alone.
