This week we featured research on tax reform, illegal drugs, maternal leave and more!
In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Sebastian Galiani offers rare insight on what it takes to redesign a country's tax system under fiscal pressure, political constraints, and chronic economic volatility. Drawing on his experience as Argentina's Deputy Minister of Treasury, Galiani reflects on the logic of the reforms, the compromises required to pass them, and why credibility ultimately proved as important as technical design.
What does it actually take to reform land at scale? In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, we are joined by Thierry Hoza Ngoga, one of the leading implementers of Rwanda’s landmark land regularisation programme, to walk through how Rwanda registered over 10 million parcels, issued more than 7 million title deeds, and did so at a cost of roughly $6 per parcel.
Can combining peer support with financial incentives help women overcome intrahousehold and social barriers to family planning access? In India, S Anukriti, Catalina Herrera-Almanza, and Mahesh Karra conducted a randomised controlled trial providing married women with subsidies for family planning services, alongside vouchers encouraging them to ‘Bring-a-Friend’. The ‘Bring-a-Friend’ vouchers not only substantially increased modern contraceptive use and reduced the probability of pregnancy, but also changed who accompanied women to the clinic.
Can a local drug supply shock become a global crime shock? Gianmarco Daniele, Adam Soliman, and Vargas F. Juan show that it can: a local expansion in cocaine supply propagated through trade networks and generated downstream increases in crime. They trace the consequences of Colombia’s mid-2010s cocaine boom from production areas in Colombia to transit hubs in Ecuador and onwards to consumer markets in Europe. The central result is simple: shocks in illicit markets propagate much like shocks in legal trade, but with one crucial difference. In legal markets, adjustment occurs through prices and contracts, while in illicit ones, it often happens through criminal competition, corruption, and violence.
Drawing on the first comparable, country-level evidence base from Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico, and South Africa, the IEA documents significant variation in where and how women exit the academic economics pipeline. The findings suggest that effective interventions must be country-specific, targeting the precise bottleneck – whether at postgraduate entry, the PhD-to-faculty transition, or senior promotion – rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Inés Berniell, Ashwini Deshpande, Raquel Fernández, Navika Mehta, and Fiona Tregenna discuss.
In India, Pulak Ghosh, Stephanie Hao, Lisa Ho, Garima Sharma, and Shreya Tandon find that expanding paid maternity leave in India from 12 to 26 weeks led employers to cut women's employment by up to 10% and favour men for promotions, while leaving wages unchanged. Women greatly valued longer leaves such that the policy was broadly cost-benefit neutral, but better-designed alternatives – such as insurance mechanisms spread across all workers or correcting employer beliefs about women’s leave taking – could benefit women while limiting job loss.
Destroying illicit crops at the source is meant to weaken criminal economies and create space for development. However, evidence from Colombia's aerial glyphosate programme tells a different story. Daniela Horta Sáenz and Anderson Tami-Patiño find that eradication triggered income shocks that pulled children out of school, with lasting effects on education, child labour, early marriage, and living standards – while achieving limited reductions in coca cultivation.
Many countries around the world are facing a growing waste crisis. A key challenge for policymakers is that effective waste management does not depend on infrastructure alone – it also requires active participation from households. In Peru, Hanna Fuhrmann-Riebel, Ben D’Exelle, Kristian López Vargas, Sebastian Tonke, and Arjan Verschoor show that correcting social misperceptions and sending SMS reminders can significantly boost recycling participation.
Elsewhere in development:
- Stephen Brien has a new series of blogs on the thirteen economies that, over sixty years of post-war development, had ever sustained the kind of growth that actually transforms an economy’s underlying productive structure.
- On In Development, Daniel Yu makes the case for starting a company rather than working in aid.
- (How) Do the Poorest Use AI? by Daniel Björkegren on CGD.
- Johan Fourie on what he told Heads of Department about AI.
- Julia Kaufman and Ying Gao write that Africa’s jobs problem is a market access problem.
- Jacobus Cilliers writes on change from within and evidence-based policy.