This week we featured research on social insurance, industrial parks, tax audits and more!
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, we were joined by Bill McRaith, who has spent his career building supply chains across the world, working on both the manufacturing and retail side of the apparel industry. He started in the UK, in factories supplying Marks & Spencer, at a time when almost all of the supply chain was local, in the same time zone and market. But that model was breaking fast, and his career then took him around the world.
War dominates headlines and policy debates, but a new book argues that everyday interpersonal violence – homicide, intimate partner violence, and child abuse – inflicts far greater harm on humanity than collective violence ever does. James Fearon, co-author with Anke Hoeffler of Worse Than War: The Global Costs of Violence, joined us on VoxDevTalks this week to explain why this form of violence is so badly underestimated, and what can be done to reduce it.
A large temporary cash incentive rapidly enrolled millions of informal workers into Thailand's voluntary social insurance programme, demonstrating that enrolment barriers can be overcome when incentives are strong enough. However, the high dropout rate and choices made at sign-up suggest that low baseline enrolment reflects a genuine lack of demand for the product, with important implications for how governments design and promote social insurance schemes. Benjamin A. Olken, Rema Hanna, Phitawat Poonpolkul, and Nada Wasi discuss.
Policies that allocate scarce resources often embed hidden values. Daniel Björkegren, Joshua Blumenstock, and Samsun Knight develop a method to recover the value judgments implicit in allocation rules and apply it to Mexico’s flagship cash transfer programme, PROGRESA. The results demonstrate how future policies can be shaped to align with the values of policymakers and constituents.
In Ethiopia, Guangbo Huang, Min Wang, and Huayu Xu show that industrial parks have substantially increased local economic activity, household living standards, and women’s empowerment. However, they find that gains stay close to the parks and depend heavily on where parks are built.
Audits do more than recover unpaid taxes. In South Africa, Collen Lediga, Nadine Riedel, and Kristina Strohmaier find that they also increase tax reporting by audited firms’ geographic neighbours and by other clients of the same tax practitioner. This implies that revenue collection could be strengthened if authorities moved beyond narrow audit strategies focused solely on immediate revenue gains and adopted broader enforcement designs that account for network compliance spillovers.
Global evidence from 33,262 mining sites shows that mineral price booms increase deforestation in nearby areas, beyond immediate mine sites. Victoria Wenxin Xie, Wei You, and Ran Goldblatt find that investor origin shapes the size of these effects: mines owned by investors from higher-income countries generate lower deforestation responses, especially in lower-income host countries.
In Ghana, Kehinde Ajayi, Willa Friedman, and Adrienne Lucas conducted a large-scale randomised controlled trial across 900 junior high schools covering roughly 42,000 students, introducing a low-cost, scalable information package. They find that the intervention improved students’ applications outcomes but did not increase enrolment, suggesting that information alone cannot resolve the deeper behavioural and structural frictions families face.
In Tanzania, Manisha Shah, Jennifer Seager, Joao Montalvao, and Markus Goldstein outline evidence from two low-cost interventions targeting adolescent girls and boys. Separately, each intervention produced large, cost-effective reductions in intimate partner violence.
Elsewhere in development:
- IGC has released an AI Playbook for government.