This week we featured research on institutions, maternity leave, droughts and more!
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, Leonard Wantchekon joined us to discuss why cities are best understood not as a youth problem but as a youth opportunity. For Leonard, the problems we do see in cities are usually a story about governance, not about the young people themselves.
China's Great Famine of 1959–1961 is the deadliest in recorded history, claiming an estimated 30 to 40 million lives. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Shaoda Wang discusses new research examining one underexplored contributor to that catastrophe: the mass extermination of sparrows under Mao Zedong's Four Pests campaign.
New evidence from colonial history is challenging the consensus that extractive institutions always harm long-run development, showing that outcomes depend on whether extraction left behind durable public infrastructure and state capacity. In Colombia, municipalities subjected to the Spanish encomienda – a colonial system of forced indigenous labour – are wealthier and better governed today, in spite of the extractive institution imposed on them. Jean-Paul Faguet and Fabio Sánchez discuss in two articles.
Mortality among infants significant increased during the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in India, not because infants were infected, but because the pandemic disrupted healthcare access, worsened economic conditions, and discouraged mothers from seeking hospital care. Using nationally representative data, Erdal Asker, Shatakshee Dhongde, and Abu S. Shonchoy provide the first systematic evidence of this hidden but significant indirect toll on infants in India.
In 2011, after decades without major reforms to parental leave, the Chilean government extended maternity leave from 12 to 24 weeks for women contributing to social security. In recent work, Fernanda Rojas-Ampuero examines the effects of this reform on mothers’ labour market outcomes up to seven years after childbirth. She finds that the reform increased women’s formal employment during the first three years after birth, with no negative effects in the medium term.
In Zambia, Martin Paul Jr. Tabe-Ojong, Emmanuel Tolani, and Ernest L. Molua study over 6,600 farm households and find that droughts reduce yields of maize, beans, and groundnuts while prompting smallholders to diversify crops, adopt resilient seed varieties, and expand cultivated area. This suggests that well-timed extension support and greater investment in drought-tolerant crops could significantly strengthen the adaptive capacity of smallholder farming systems.
In Mexico, Lorenzo Aldeco, Matteo Ghilardi, and Hugo Tuesta find that rising homicide rates have left aggregate employment largely unchanged – but beneath this apparent stability, violence is reshaping who works and where, holding back the labour market and undermining productivity.
Elsewhere:
- Charles Kenny asks Where’s My Ministry For Emigration?
- Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan write about India's AI Policy: Concrete the state understands, Cognition it does not.