This week we featured research on women's employment, microfinance, mental health and more!
This week on Ideas in Development, Rachel Glennerster discusses what development economists should be working on – and how their work actually reaches the people making decisions.
In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Karen Macours and Rachid Laajaj explain why smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are slow to adopt new agricultural technologies.
In Saudi Arabia, Chaza Abou Daher, Erica Field, Kendal Swanson, and Kate Vyborny partnered with a local nonprofit to provide women who expressed interest in driving entry to a training course. They found that providing access to training led to a significant increase in licensing, which translated into improved mobility and employment. However, these gains were largely concentrated among younger, never married, and widowed women.
Traditional microcredit rarely transforms the economic lives of the poor in Bangladesh, but targeted product innovations – including flexible repayment schedules, enterprise-focused loans, and digital disbursement – show meaningful gains for borrowers. Realising these gains at scale requires overcoming regulatory constraints, low digital adoption, and an unstable lending environment. Nusrat Jahan reflects on the future of microfinance in Bangladesh.
Jessica Leight explains the state of play in development economics, discussing methods, funders, and research focus.
Trade economists have argued that global competition from trade makes gender discrimination costly. Why then has trade-driven growth not translated into greater gender parity in labour markets for Indian women? Rozi Kumari, Prarthna Agarwal Goel, and Devasmita Jena reveal that the gains from trade for female workers depend not just on a factory’s export intensity but on how it produces.
In Mexico, Manuela Angelucci, Raissa Fabregas, and Antonia Vazquez studied the impacts of offering an AI-powered mental health app to women in Mexico experiencing psychological distress. They found that app use started high but declined substantially over time; nevertheless, positive effects emerged quickly – with access to the app reducing the prevalence of moderate-or-higher depression and anxiety symptoms. Participants also reported improvements across a broader set of wellness and functioning behaviours.
In Brazil, Miriam Bruhn, Gabriel Garber, Sergio Koyama, and Bilal Zia conducted a long-run study tracking students nine years after a school financial education programme – finding lasting reductions in expensive credit use, improved loan repayment, and a shift towards entrepreneurship. This suggests that well-designed curricula can reshape both financial and occupational decisions.
In Colombia, Manuel Munoz finds that disclosing the identity-based criteria used to select students for a free training programme reduced enrolment, suggesting that how targeted invitations are framed shapes whether intended beneficiaries actually participate.
Elsewhere in development:
- Africa Urban Lab was featured in The Economist.
- Han Sheng Chia discusses his underlying priors on AI.
- Oliver Hanney was interviewed by the FT on whether AI will trigger a new wave of philanthropy.
- Oliver Hanney provides an updated list of resources on AI and development economics.