This week we featured research on China's solar industry, collectivisation's long shadow, food prices and more!
We are hosting two online events next week!
- On Tuesday March 10th (15:00 GMT), Tristan Reed, Rodimiro Rodrigo, Gustavo de Souza, and Markus Poschke will cover the present and future of industrialisation, focusing on trade, automation, and firms. Register here.
- On Thursday March 12th (13:30 GMT), Aniket Panjwani will take us through how development economists can get set up to use agents for research, focusing on the cheapest options currently available, and general lessons for working with agents. Register here.
And we released two podcasts:
- On Ideas in Development, Josh Lerner discusses technology diffusion, the role of venture capital, universities, and China in this process, and whether AI will follow historical patterns.
- On VoxDevTalks, Adam Storeygard outlines what research tells us regarding transport policy in low- and middle-income countries.
In China, local governments introduced solar subsidies to produce, install, and perform R&D. Ignacio Banares-Sanchez, Robin Burgess, David Laszlo, Pol Simpson, John Van Reenen, and Yifan Wang show that these policies were a major cause of the industry’s explosive growth. These local industrial policies explain about half of the global price decline since 2004, which, in turn, has become a major factor driving the diffusion of solar energy across the world.
Stephen Ayerst, Loren Brandt, and Diego Restuccia show that barriers to resource allocation discourage farmers from making productivity-enhancing investments, which magnifies the productivity losses over time. Using detailed panel data from Vietnam and exploiting historical differences in institutions between the north and south, they quantify these effects and find that dynamic losses more than double the cost of misallocation.
Rising crop prices usually quiet conflict, as labourers choose farming over fighting. In Myanmar, rising rice prices instead fuelled state-led violence against civilians. C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Jaya Wen challenge narratives that frame such atrocities as a reaction to insurgencies, showing how economic incentives can systematically shape persecution when power is heavily skewed toward the state.
In India, Dean Yang, Alessandro Saia, Akhila Kovvuri, Resuf Ahmed, and Paul Brimble find that a religious television broadcast strengthened Hindu identity in the 1980s, catalysing lasting electoral shifts, conflict, and institutional change. These effects persisted well beyond the 18-month broadcast through a self-reinforcing feedback loop, whereby identity change drove political realignment, which in turn enabled the expansion of religious schools that perpetuated the original cultural shift.
Economists often attempt to study places for which data is scarce or non-existent, up to and including entire countries. Stephen Haggard, Kyoochul Kim, and Munseob Lee use North Korea as an entry point to review the forensic methods that researchers have developed to extract usable economic information from such settings. These include satellite imagery, mirror trade data, price monitoring, refugee surveys, humanitarian data, and text mining.
Clément Imbert and Gabriel Ulyssea examine the decade-long effects of drought-induced migration on Brazilian cities between 2000 and 2010. Their findings reveal a striking pattern: immigration substantially reduces informality, has no effect on unemployment, and sparks the creation of thousands of new formal firms and jobs.
Darin Christensen, Alexander Hartman, Cyrus Samii, and Alessandro Toppeta evaluate whether negotiation training can improve outcomes for rural communities in Liberia. They implemented a 12-hour training in interest-based negotiation with leaders from 120 communities negotiating over land and forest resource deals. Six months after the training, they find evidence that participants retained and applied the negotiation skills they leaned, with gains translating into materially better negotiation outcomes.
Elsewhere in development:
- J-PAL are hiring an AI Policy Lead, a great opportunity to lead an important team doing exciting work!
- GiveWell has launched two requests for information to expand their funding for vaccination outreach and anemia control.
- This new page on Our World in Data is really useful: Work and Employment. Thanks to Bertha Rohenkohl, Pablo Arriagada, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina for putting it together.
- Scott Cunningham on his Substack series Claude Code: Research and Publishing Are Now Two Different Things.
- I enjoyed Eric Verhoogen's research video - Speeding Up Green Technology Adoption.