This week we featured research on AI, gender, electrification, mobile money and more!
In our new series of Ideas in Development on AI, Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa aim to help you think like an economist about the impacts of AI, cut through the noise, and learn about the key opportunities and challenges for low- and middle-income countries in the AI age. In our second episode this week, we ask whether the industrial revolution is a sensible comparison for the AI era, and explore what that would imply. To do so, we are joined by economic historian Bruno Caprettini, who has researched the impacts of new technologies during this period.
In this week’s episode of Economics Unpacked, we explore the economics behind public works programmes, sometimes called 'workfare', and what the evidence tells us about their real impact on jobs, wages, and long-term poverty reduction. Drawing on economic research from India and Ethiopia, we speak to economists Manisha Shah and Simon Franklin to discuss why public works programmes can be powerful, but are not a silver bullet.
In Bangladesh’s garment sector, firms often under-promote women because of biased beliefs and distorted learning about women’s managerial ability. Rocco Macchiavello, Andreas Menzel, Atonu Rabbani, and Christopher Woodruff demonstrate that temporary, low-risk trials can correct these beliefs and lead to sustained increases in female supervisors even when initial performance appears weaker.
In Rwanda, Lise Masselus, Jörg Ankel-Peters, Anicet Munyehirwe, and Maximiliane Sievert revisit rural Rwandan communities a decade after electrification. Not only do they find that electrification does not translate into universal connection, but also that electricity consumption remains extremely low among households that do connect to the grid. Adoption has also remained limited in enterprises and public facilities, explaining the lack of broader structural change in local economies.
After Kenya’s 2013 adoption of a mobile money tax, at least 17 sub-Saharan African countries have since introduced similar levies. Proponents emphasise revenue potential and ease of collection, while critics worry about efficiency losses and regressivity where formal banking is limited. Using cross-country evidence, Michael Barczay, Shafik Hebous, Fayçal Sawadogo, and Jean François Wen show that mobile money taxes raise transaction costs and reduce usage, creating sizable efficiency losses which disproportionately fall on unbanked and rural users.
In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Barbara Petrongolo and Ashwini Deshpande explore one of the most persistent challenges in development economics: gender inequality in labour markets. The discussion ranges across high-, middle- and low-income countries, examining legal reforms, social norms, unpaid care work, measurement challenges, and the political economy of gender-focused policies.
In recent years, evidence from multiple contexts has highlighted how expanding enrolment is not sufficient if learning outcomes remain unequal. Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri and Andrés Álvarez observe that the rigid social hierarchy established during the Spanish colonial era persists in modern Colombia, where Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations occupy the lowest rungs on the socioeconomic ladder and experience the worst economic and political outcomes.
In India, Suneha Seetahul, Matthieu Clément, and Pierre Levasseur explain that as women become scarcer, some of the social and economic conditions that sustain strong son preference begin to weaken, pointing to a ‘self-corrective’ dynamic within the missing women crisis.
A growing number of urban areas around the world face water scarcity. Focusing on the prolonged drought that Cape Town experienced from 2015 to 2018, Alexander Abajian, Cassandra Cole, Kelsey Jack, Kyle Meng, and Martine Visser examine how adaptation shaped outcomes for the city’s residents and its municipal water utility. While policy measures including higher prices and usage restrictions saved the city from running out of water, they reduced demand more among wealthy households who were able to substitute away from municipal water, undermining the utility’s ability to cross-subsidise lower-income households’ consumption.
In Argentina, Juan Pedro Ronconi and Diego Ramos-Toro show that compulsory military service strengthened national identity and social integration in the long run, but had no meaningful effect on civic behaviour, institutional trust, or broader socio-economic outcomes – demonstrating that nation-building through shared service does not automatically translate into stronger civic engagement or state capacity.
Elsewhere in development:
- Dina Pomeranz lets students from low- and middle-income countries join her global policy analysis class. Ask to join here. (via Lauren Gilbert weekly links)
- Don’t Scrap the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact, Make It Better by Lee Crawfurd and Ian Mitchell on CGD.
- Mark Suzman writes about the Foundation's road to 2045.