This week we featured research on trade, corruption, migration, R&D and more!
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Over the past 20 years, Brazil has operated a large-scale R&D subsidy programme, providing over US$10 billion to 1,454 firms. Gustavo de Souva finds that these R&D subsidies helped spurred long-term growth by helping financially constrained firms adopt foreign technologies and expand into high-tariff markets through import substitution.
Ana María Ibáñez, Juliana Quigua, Jimena Romero, and Andrea Velásquez estimate the impact of exposure to extreme heat on agricultural production in El Salvador, examining how corn producers respond to extreme temperatures in a context where support from established migrant networks lowers the cost of international migration. Not only does extreme heat lower agricultural productivity and rural incomes, it also pushes farmers to use international migration as a climate adaptation strategy.
In Chile, Pablo Muñoz and Cristóbal Otero analyse a major senior civil service reform that introduced competitive recruitment for top managers of public hospitals: CEOs. They find that merit-based recruitment and higher pay attracted better-trained managers, leading to lower mortality rates and improved healthcare performance.
In Brazil, Gustavo Bobonis, Paul Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Simeon Nichter study Brazil’s prominent anti-corruption programme to examine whether fighting corruption can reduce clientelism. They find that anti-corruption audits substantially reduced vote buying and citizens’ demands for private favours, demonstrating how transparency initiatives can weak clientelism and strengthen democratic accountability.
In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Pinelopi Goldberg and Michele Ruta discuss their forthcoming handbook chapter on the changing nature of international trade. Together, they revisit the past decades of globalisation and ask whether the era of ‘growth miracles’ is now over.
Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov evaluate the impact of Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme, the country’s largest development programme from 2001 to 2021, aimed at building state legitimacy. They find that while such programmes can reduce violence when insurgencies are locally driven, they may misallocate resources and even fuel conflict when insurgents are not reliant on local populations for support.
In Iran, Maggie Chen and Ebad Ebadi examine a 2016 female labour reform, intended to provide ‘social security’ for vulnerable women. While the reform modestly reduced the working hours of eligible women, it also led to significant declines in formal employment among both targeted and non-targeted women of childbearing age.
Noam Angrist discusses academic incentives, how they compare to incentives for policymakers and practitioners, and why they ultimately matter for research and policy.
Ariel Akerman, Jacob Moscona, Heitor Pellegrina, and Karthik Sastry study Embrapa – a large public R&D effort to create agricultural innovation suited to Brazil’s ecology – which shifted research towards local needs and raised agricultural productivity by 110%, far outweighing its costs.
Elsewhere in development:
- Make sure to check out the World Bank's Development Impact Blog, which is currently featuring one job market paper each day: interesting articles this week on poverty traps, price controls, stunting and more!
- Also on Job Market Papers, Lauren Gilbert has gathered all the migration-related job market papers from the top 150 economics departments.
- On the IGC blog: Does climate change cause conflict? by Hélène Donnat Gonzalez Holguera & Miguel Fajardo-Steinhäuser.
- GiveWell have written about their grantmaking to safe water projects.
- Two great episodes of In Pursuit of Development with Dan Banik. Happy Kayuni on democracy against the odds in Malawi and Rachel Glennerster on the future of global development.
- What happened to global carbon emissions this year? Hannah Ritchie summarises the stats.
- Who’s Really Most Vulnerable to Climate Change? Jonathan Beynon on SIDS, LDCs, and Adaptation Finance.
- Meron Tesfaye, W. Gyude Moore and Todd Moss outline their 'rings of growth' - How Mining Can Drive Energy and Jobs.