This week we featured research on IT booms, fertiliser, decentralisation, violence and more!
This week on Ideas in Development, Rafe Meager discussed aggregating evidence in the social sciences, the research process, and how to read results.
The $1-a-day poverty line has been a fixture of global development for nearly four decades, shaping how organisations, governments, and the public understand and respond to poverty. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Lant Pritchett discusses the origins of the original measure, why it has endured despite its flaws, and what a new upper-bound line would mean for how development is understood and funded.
Devaki Ghose, Eduardo Fraga, and Ana Fernandes apply a model of trade and agriculture to Sri Lanka’s 2021 chemical fertiliser import ban, showing how costly fertiliser shortages can be. They also find that local field-experiment estimates of fertiliser’s effect on crop yield can exaggerate the economy-wide impact of a nationwide shortage: when fertiliser becomes scarce, wages, crop prices, and production choices adjust, partly cushioning the yield losses. Applying the same framework to a severe fertiliser disruption through the Strait of Hormuz suggests smaller, but still meaningful, effects.
Whether splitting helps or hurts development is ultimately an empirical question. Ricardo Dahis and Christiane Szerman tackle this question using a large redistricting episode in Brazil. Between 1988 and 1997, the country went from 4,124 to 5,507 municipalities, a 34% rise. The reform devolved administrative, fiscal, and political authority to over a thousand new local governments. They find that when Brazil let neglected districts break away and form new municipalities, peripheral areas gained services, jobs, and growth at no visible cost to the rest of the country.
In Mexico, José A. Jurado and Juan S. Morales find that violence against journalists reduces media activity in the months following an attack and, in the long run, reshapes the profession towards younger and less-established reporters – with lasting implications for local government transparency and electoral outcomes.
Eric Dodge, Yusuf Neggers, Rohini Pande, and Charity Troyer Moore study how to reduce payment delays in the world's largest workfare programme: India's MGNREGS. Working with India's Ministry of Rural Development, they developed PayDash, a mobile and web application that does not generate new data, but rather reorganises existing information in a more accessible and actionable format. They find that PayDash led to faster, more reliable payment processing and increased workfare activity, particularly during the lean season. These results point to strained management capacity, rather than agency concerns.
India’s IT boom is often told as a success story of globalisation, but the gains were not evenly distributed across space. Some districts became major IT hubs, while others benefited much less. Devaki Ghose finds that districts more exposed to the IT boom experienced larger increases in both IT employment and engineering enrolment. However, she also finds that migration fell sharply with distance for both, and that people were much less likely to move for education than for work. This demonstrates how lowering work-related migration costs only helps workers who already possess the relevant skills, and how education policy may matter as much as labour-market policy in determining who gains from globalisation.
Natural disasters displace millions of people a year, yet we know surprisingly little about their economic impacts in lower-income countries. Existing research has found that disaster displacement can bring surprising benefits by moving people to more productive or better-suited locations, but this evidence base has largely been restricted to high-income countries. What happens when disaster strikes in the rest of the world? Evidence from Uganda suggests that natural disasters can reduce income and life satisfaction for years, especially when households are displaced without their social networks. Travis Baseler and Jakob Hennig explain.
Julio Acuña studies shocks to the global supply of weapons to identify the impact of violence as a driver of migration from the Northern Triangle and Mexico to the US. He finds a clear 'first-stage' effect: a 1% increase in the supply of weapons raises homicidal violence in the Northern Triangle and Mexico by approximately 0.34%. Paradoxically, these weapons are often transferred through official legal protocols intended to keep them in 'the right hands'. Instead of deterring crime, this increased availability appears to fuel cycles of escalation between national institutions and powerful criminal organisations.
Firm growth in Africa depends not just on founder ideas but on building capable teams, developing local managerial talent, and equipping people with the skills needed to scale sustainably. Key gaps remain in identifying high-potential founders early, supporting team formation, retaining skilled local managers, and building the institutional capacity to harness AI in ways suited to African market realities. Vittorio Bassi, Amanda Awadey, Ama Baafra Abeberese, Virginia Minni, and Anne Kersting discuss in this VoxDev blog.
Elsewhere in development:
- CGD has a request for proposals for Up to $5 Million for Research on Global Lead Poisoning.
- David McKenzie has written about the dangers of taking theory too literally, of log(x/a+1) transforms, and place versus cows in determining poverty dynamics.
- Jishnu Das has started releasing a new series of blogs titled Economists and Mental Health.
- And Ken Opalo has written a caution against faddist approaches to industrial policy (the old industrial policy rules still apply).
And last but not least! Aaditya Mattoo, Anna Tompsett, and Eddy Zou are working on a project about complementarity that asks whether and when development interventions work better together than separately. Their project combines a review of existing evidence with an expert survey and observational data about policymaker choices. They'd be super grateful if you'd take 10 minutes to share your views via this survey.