This week we featured research on electrification, dowry, famine, construction and more!
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Earlier this week we announced our forthcoming VoxDevLit on Political Polarisation. Register here to join Senior Editors Cesi Cruz and Horacio Larreguy at the launch event on October 27th.
Electrification is often seen as the spark for development. But in much of Africa, the biggest benefits may come not from households plugging in, but from the community services that light up around them. Maika Schmidt and Alexander Moradi outline research on Burkina Faso.
Natalie Bau, Gaurav Khanna, Corinne Low, and Alessandra Voena show that in India parents often retain a share of dowry, which may enable sons to migrate for work, and provides a new role for dowry in modern times.
The 1933 Soviet famine was not the inevitable result of poor harvests but of Stalin’s collectivisation and procurement policies, which disproportionately targeted Ukrainians and produced catastrophic, unequal mortality. Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian explain.
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Martina Kirchberger discusses the economics of infrastructure and the construction sector.
Giordano Mion, Luca David Opromolla, and Alessandro Sforza find that firms were more likely to enter Angola’s market after the civil war if they employed managers with prior, Angola-specific export experience – highlighting the critical role of managerial human capital in overcoming fixed entry costs in post-conflict economies.
Cross-country measures of investment networks reveal how the structure of capital flows across sectors shifts systematically with development. This accounts for around one-third of global income disparities, with the payoff of policies shifting sectorial productivity depending critically on a country’s stage of development and its investment linkages. Lucía Casal and Julieta Caunedo discuss.
Political elites don’t just govern, many also own businesses. In Mozambique, Sam Jones, Felix Schilling, and Finn Tarp find that public office is often converted into private business capital, highlighting how political power can be a direct route to economic influence, both for office holders and their families.
Amory Gethin explains that education has been a major driver of global growth and poverty reduction since 1980, accounting for nearly half of overall income gains – boosting productivity while reducing inequality and making public schooling a key engine of poverty reduction.
COP30 presents an ambitious agenda for advancing climate goals amid unprecedented global uncertainty. How can the economic evidence covered on VoxDev since COP29 – on biodiversity, agriculture, cities, health, and renewables – and the subsequent gaps, help shape more effective policymaking? Deputy Managing Editor Emaan Siddique reflects.
Elsewhere in development:
- Cholera in Africa: Rising Deaths, Shrinking US Aid by Markus Goldstein, Eeshani Kandpal, Charles Kenny, Juan Manuel Menéndez and Brian Webster.
- Scam Cities by Tianyu Fang on Asterisk.
- What’s wrong with (development) economics - Jishnu Das on the (ab)use of epistemic authority.
- Chris Isaac and Samantha Attridge on How a Simple Tax Incentive Could Mobilise Billions in Private Investment for Sustainable Development.
- An interesting looking event at CGD on Scaling Evidence-Based Policy Innovation.
- And J-PAL Global are hiring a Communications Manager.