This week we featured research on solar panels in Vietnam, food security, son preference in India, public vs private transit and more!
This week, we released our new VoxDevLit on EdTech. Senior Editor Abhijeet Singh, and Co-Editors Laia Navarro-Sola and Philip Oreopoulos, summarise everything you need to know about EdTech.
In this week's podcast, Seema Jayachandran and Alessandra Voena discuss what economic research has taught us about women’s power in the household. Some key takeaways include:
- Economic development does not guarantee advances towards equal rights.
- The jury is still out on the knock-on benefits for children from empowering women. But these should be seen as a potential bonus on top of the primary motivation of empowering women, which is to improve their welfare.
- Policies can be framed as enlarging, rather than redividing, the pie for households.
While trade can provide cheaper access to food, it also makes countries vulnerable to trade disruptions, such as those triggered by geopolitical conflicts, export bans, climate shocks, or shipping breakdowns. On Tuesday, Tasso Adamopoulos and Fernando Leibovici showed that the risk of trade disruptions fundamentally shapes how countries organise production and set policy.
A global boom in solar panels is powering the world's clean energy transition, and Vietnam has emerged as a solar panel manufacturing success story. But how exactly did Vietnam achieve this export success? In Monday's article, Meng Yu Ngov, Pierre-Louis Vézina, Trang Thu Tran & Gaurav Nayyar demonstrate that Vietnam's solar boom was built on three key pillars: foreign direct investment (mostly from China), access to subsidised Chinese inputs, and productivity spillovers from multinationals to domestic suppliers.
Thirty years after Amartya Sen famously claimed that 100 million women were ‘missing’ in Asia, India’s problem of sex selection remains deeply entrenched. Today on VoxDev, Girija Borker, Jan Eeckhout, Nancy Luke, Shantidani Minz, Kaizan Munshi, and Soumya Swaminathan outline new evidence uncovering how institutional features of the marriage market are behind persistent sex selection in India.
The world is urbanising at an unprecedented pace. By 2050, nearly seven in ten people will live in cities, and almost all of that growth will occur in low- and middle-income countries. Cities like Lagos, Nairobi, and Dhaka are growing faster than their transport systems can keep up. In most developing cities, the majority of trips are currently made on privately operated minibuses, shared taxis, and motorcycle taxis. Yet as cities grow and become wealthier, many have begun to invest in government-run public transit. On Tuesday, Daniel Björkegren, Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal and Nick Tsivanidis explored the impacts of introducing new public buses in Lagos, including on the existing private transit sector.
Elsewhere in development:
- Justin Sandefur has a new blog named ChatGDP, the first post is titled - Washington's new model of foreign aid for economic growth.
- Ashleigh Gillwald Morrell from TaRL Africa on scaling across borders by working with governments.
- On 3ie - What does evidence-informed policymaking look like?
- The Center for Global Development will be holding its second Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure in June 2026 and are looking for submissions.
- Saving lives with fewer dollars on Planet Money.
- And last but not least, the World Bank's Dev Impact Job Market Blogs continue, make sure to check them out.