This week we featured research on climate-conflict poverty traps, transport infrastructure and more!
Earlier this week, Oliver Hanney released his summary of development economics in 2025, with ten key insights on getting stuff done, paying for it, and a whole lot more.
New projections highlight the feedback loop between lower growth and increased conflict risk in Africa under climate change. Today's article highlights the important links between broader development policy and peacekeeping. Joel Ferguson, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel and Solomon Hsiang's workd shows that growth-promoting policies provide large additional social benefits.
An analysis of 100,000s of job adverts and millions of applications has shed new light on how the application process for jobs shapes the gender wage gap. Sugat Chaturvedi, Kanika Mahajan and Zahra Siddique show that the language used in job adverts steers young Indian women towards low-paying and stereotypical job roles.
This week on VoxDevTalks, Ellora Derenoncourt discussed how profits and economic linkages from slavery contributed to European and especially British development between the 16th and 19th centuries. Drawing on newly assembled data and modern econometric tools, she revisits the long-running debate sparked by Eric Williams, whose hypothesis that slavery financed the Industrial Revolution remains highly contested – but also highly influential.
After the Mexican Revolution, governments tried to unify a fragmented country by expanding transport infrastructure. For the state, this project was a public good that would modernise the countryside and forge Mexicanidad (i.e. a shared national identity). For many Indigenous communities, however, new transport infrastructure looked more like a public “bad”: a way to undermine autonomy, dilute local institutions, and erode distinct languages and traditions. Tuesday's article, by Aldo Elizalde, Eduardo Hidalgo, Nayeli Salgado and Sotiris Kampanelis unpacks this nation-building effort.
Major earthquakes raise sovereign spreads only in countries with low administrative and fiscal capacity, while spreads remain unchanged – or even fall slightly – in high-capacity states. Rabah Arezki, Patrick A. Imam, Kangni Kpodar and Dao Le-Van show that the spread response emerges with a delay of one to two months, consistent with investors pricing not the physical shock itself but what it reveals about a government’s ability to manage its fiscal and administrative aftermath. These findings highlight that state capacity functions as a form of sovereign insurance, and that incorporating institutional quality into sovereign-risk assessments could improve the evaluation of vulnerability to natural and climate-related shocks.