This week we featured research on internal migration, long-run development, middlemen and more...
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Given the increasingly broad scope of research in development economics, it feels more and more difficult to define what development economics actually is. So, for this VoxDev blog, I asked a range of development economists how they define development economics.
In India, Raahil Madhok, Frederik Noack, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Olivier Deschenes demonstrate that the internal migration of agricultural workers leads to a downsizing of farms near cities and an expansion in remote areas, prompting a spatial reorganisation of agriculture whereby remote, non-migrant households adopt more technology and expand production.
Alexandra de Pleijt and Ewout Frankema discuss their research showing that higher education played a key role in Southeast Asia’s long-run development much earlier than most policy accounts and research suggest.
Sumit Agarwal, Liu Ee Chia, and Pulak Ghosh find that a government-led, state-wide programme in India (the SHE Pad Scheme) which provided free sanitary pads in schools significantly reduced dropout rates among adolescent girls, primarily by increasing school attendance.
In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Meredith Startz discusses the complex role of intermediaries—wholesalers, traders, and importers—in moving goods from producers to consumers, especially in low and middle-income countries.
Vietnam’s Special Economic Zones are not just attracting investment—they are creating better, more formal jobs, with women in rural areas benefiting most. Tevin Tafese, Jann Lay, and Van Tran explain.
Can one student’s experience influence the educational decisions of those that follow? Ricardo Estrada and Jérémie Gignoux present evidence from admissions to elite schools in Peru, showing how policies that make success stories visible can have multiplier effects.
Harouna Kinda examines how the implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) led to sustained improvements in tax revenue in resource-rich developing countries, particularly as countries progressed from commitment to full EITI compliance.
In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Björn Nilsson and Clémence Pougué Biyong find that a three-day training programme to improve hairdressers’ active listening skills did not improve women’s mental health, and in fact worsened mental health outcomes for providers.
Elsewhere in development:
- Inclusion Economics Nepal is hiring a Research Associate.
- Maria Barron outlines five lessons from the Global South on people-centred AI in education.
- Priyanka Pulla has an excellent article on Asterisk: How to Vaccinate the World.
- On the FT, David Pilling writes about education in Malawi, where they have handed out adaptive teaching tablets to children across the country to teach basic literacy and numeracy.