This week we featured research on industrial policy, women's reservation, health insurance and more!
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, Chris Blattman joined us to unpack how organised crime evolves in cities, why it is so difficult to dislodge once entrenched, and what fast-growing cities can do to get ahead of this problem.
Can relaxing credit constraints boost farmers' profits in low- and middle-income countries? It is a question that sits at the heart of agricultural development policy – and one to which the answer turns out to be frustratingly elusive. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Craig McIntosh discusses a recent J-PAL policy insight that takes stock of the evidence from randomised controlled trials on credit, subsidies, and cash transfers for smallholder farmers, arriving at conclusions that challenge some of agriculture's most persistent development assumptions.
Kieran Byrne, Florence Kondylis, John Loeser, and Denis Mukama ask whether the promotion of mask manufacturing during the COVID-19 pandemic was effective at increasing the availability of masks and slowing the spread in Rwanda. Licensing textile manufacturers to produce high-quality masks during the COVID-19 pandemic successfully reduced mask prices, increased mask uptake, and slowed the spread of COVID-19. The intervention averted contagion at a cost of just $10 per averted case, suggesting strategic industrial policy has a clear role in pandemic preparedness.
While evidence suggests that India’s 2023 Women’s Reservation Bill should unambiguously benefit women, S Anukriti, Bilge Erten, and Priya Mukherjee show that the implications may be more complicated. Examining state-level elections across India, they find that female politicians significantly improve access to reproductive healthcare for rural women, leading to greater use of modern contraception and better birth spacing. However, these gains come with an unintended cost: in households where husbands want more sons, wives' greater contraceptive use triggers marital conflict and increases intimate partner violence against women.
China has achieved near-universal public health insurance coverage, yet out-of-pocket spending remains relatively high. To address this gap, China introduced City-Customised Supplemental Medical Insurance (CCSMI), a government-endorsed, privately operated supplemental programme. CCSMI stands out for its rapid scale-up and broad participation at low premiums, but what happens elsewhere in the insurance system? In recent work, Hui Ding, Xintong Wang, and Xian Xu examine how this expansion affects private insurance markets.
A growing evidence base examines how policymakers engage with evidence, and how training can build capacity for evidence use, but much less is known about what drives evidence diffusion within organisations. To test this, Mahvish Shaukat, Andreas Stegmann, and Mattie Toma designed a large-scale framed field experiment at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC, involving 1,319 permanent employees across 360 divisions. They found that hierarchy determines who shares evidence, and that shifting beliefs about peers has no effect on generative AI adoption.
Aakash Bhalothia, Gavin Engelstad, Gaurav Khanna, and Harrison Mitchell provide the first global evidence on this question using detailed job histories for over 513 million workers across 220,000 cities in 191 countries. They find that location plays a major role in determining earnings. For workers who move across countries, about 93% of the wage difference between origin and destination cities is realised after the move. This implies that most cross-country wage gaps reflect differences in the productivity of places, rather than differences in worker characteristics. Within countries, place still matters, but less so.
Policies based on providing information rely on people engaging with it. But how can we design effective information campaigns when people are tempted to ignore them? Evidence from India shows that when people perceive that they have control over outcomes, they are less likely to ignore distressing information. Anca Balietti, Angelika Budjan, Tillmann Eymess, and Alice Soldà discuss.
Despite a long decline in agriculture's share of Ghana's economy, the sector remains vital, yet productivity gains are undermined by partial and uneven adoption of modern technologies across seeds, fertiliser, mechanisation, irrigation, and digital services. Closing this gap will require coordinated policy action that addresses financing, infrastructure, and information constraints together, rather than in isolation. Nkechi Owoo explains.
New research on agrifood employment across Africa and Asia shows that youth engagement in farming is stronger than commonly assumed, and that bundled investments, appropriate mechanisation, and upskilling programmes can generate better jobs across the sector. Realising this potential will require stronger labour data, clearer evidence on sustainable intensification, and greater attention to the employment effects of digitalisation and AI. In this week’s blog, Luc Christiaensen, Antony Chapoto, and Elena Ianchovichina discuss.
Elsewhere in development:
- The intelligence is plenty but the workers are few - Daniel Björkegren's excellent essay on abundant intelligence in LMICs.
- Charles Kenny on Dealing with the Legacy of Billions to Trillions.
- The World Bank's Infrastructure Foundations report is out now.
- Coefficient Giving are hiring a Research Fellow and Strategy Fellow on the Cause Prioritization Team.
- Tishara Garg is hiring a full-time predoctoral research assistant at Stanford, starting Fall 2026, on projects in trade and development.