This week we featured research on agricultural productivity, pensions, climate adaptation and more!
Sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter and updates on our upcoming VoxDevLit launch events straight to your inbox.
This week we released Issue 2 of our VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation. In this issue, Rachel Heath, and Co-Editors Arielle Bernhardt, Girija Borker, Anne Fitzpatrick, Anthony Keats, Madeline McKelway, Andreas Menzel, Teresa Molina, and Garima Sharma, summarise findings from research on FLFP. Rachel Heath discusses what we have learned from research on women in the workforce in this week’s companion podcast.
Agricultural productivity in developing countries remains low and uneven, with high-return crops offering significant potential gains but limited adoption due to clustered social networks that restrict the diffusion of new technologies. Andre Groeger and Yanos Zylberberg discuss evidence from Vietnam.
Qingen Gai, Naijia Guo, Bingjing Li, Qinghua Shi, and Xiaodong Zhu find that China’s New Rural Pension Scheme unexpectedly lowered the high cost of migration by freeing younger workers from household duties – boosting migration, wages, household welfare, and even national GDP.
Argentina’s volatile macroeconomic and political environment – marked by inflation, debt crises, and policy instability – makes it difficult to commit to the long-term investments needed for climate adaptation, despite the country’s high vulnerability to extreme climate events. Elisa Belfiori and Yanel Llohis reflect on the evidence on climate adaptation and how it relates to Argentina.
Lucas Davis and Paul Gertler explain how air conditioning adoption in Mexico has grown much faster than earlier forecasts, with nearly one million more units installed than predicted, largely due to falling electricity prices and rising energy efficiency that lowered the cost of cooling.
Index insurance can help smallholder farmers take on more productive risks, but its impacts remain modest, uncertain, and highly context dependent. Pauline Castaing and Jules Gazeaud discuss insights from eight experiments in agriculture.
Prachi Agarwal and Anirudh Shingal discuss how greenfield investment plays a critical role in Africa’s integration into global value chains, with inward investment in manufacturing boosting forward participation, while outward African investment in services enhances overall participation.
Economic research plays a very useful role in testing our priors and establishing when widely held beliefs turn out to be false. In this blog, Managing Editor Oliver Hanney busts common myths in development economics.
Elsewhere in development:
- Deena Mousa writes for Works in Progress about why replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems.
- On Afronomics, Andrew Dabalen speaks with Ken Opalo about building trust and capabilities for governance in Africa.
- David McKenzie writes about international migration as structural transformation policy.
- Check out this free online course at MIT on Evaluating Social Programs.
- On VoxEU, Soviet communism was not more successful at reducing inequality than other regimes by Joan Costa-i-Font, Anna Nicińska and Melcior Rossello Roig.
- Also on VoxEU, how the US South caught up by Alexander Klein, Miguel León-Ledesma and Nicholas Crafts.