This week we featured research on gender, perfect cities, community health, nowcasting and more!
This week we released Issue 2 of our VoxDevLit on Climate Adaptation. In this issue, Namrata Kala, and Co-Editors Clare Balboni and Eddy Zou, summarise economic research on weather and adaptation to climate change in developing countries. Read and download it here.
We are really excited to announce that Dani Rodrik will be joining us next week for a live episode of the Ideas in Development podcast. On Wednesday May 20th at 2pm UK time, Dani Rodrik will join Managing Editor Oliver Hanney to discuss his evolving views, the evidence that changed his mind, and what this means for future growth strategies. And we'll leave lots of time for questions from the audience.
This week on Ideas in Development, Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard and one of the world's leading urban economists, joined us to discuss the perfect city, the demons of density and what makes cities work
The Kashf Foundation has spent thirty years proving that lending to low-income women is not just socially worthwhile – it is good business. Founded in 1996 by economist Roshaneh Zafar after a formative encounter with Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus, today Kashf is Pakistan's largest microfinance organisation targeting women, with over one million active clients. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Zafar traces the institution's journey from a small Grameen replicator to a wide-ranging social enterprise tackling everything from health insurance to climate risk.
In Vietnam, Quynh Huynh and Hyejin Ku explore how economic growth interacts with gender role attitudes – male breadwinner models vs gender egalitarian values – to shape women’s labour supply. They show that the widening gender gap in employment, driven by a fall in female labour force participation, is not due to a lack of job opportunities. Instead, they argue that rising household incomes prompt a reversion to more traditional gender roles, especially in regions with less egalitarian gender role attitudes.
In El Salvador, Antonella Bancalari, Pedro Bernal, Pablo Celhay, Sebastian Martinez, and Maria Deni Sánchez examine how the nationwide introduction of community health teams – multidisciplinary primary care units deployed across municipalities starting in 2010 – altered the composition of care across all levels of the health system. They find that community health teams dramatically expanded preventative care, restructured curative care, as well as reduced preventable hospitalisations. Suggestive evidence on health outcomes corroborates these utilisation findings: amenable mortality from communicable diseases fell by around 25% following community health team introduction.
Twenty years after the Lord's Resistance Army conflict ended in northern Uganda, women who were abducted as children during the war and subsequently released show significantly higher rates of depression and perceived stress, reduced social support, and heightened stress reactivity. In striking contrast, standard economic measures suggest rough parity with non-abducted peers. Alessandra Cassar, Eeshani Kandpal, Miranda Lambert, Christine Mbabazi Mpyangu, and Danilla Serra discuss how recovery from conflict cannot be measured in income alone.
Reliable and timely information on economic activity is essential for sound macroeconomic policymaking. Yet, in many low-income countries, policymakers must often rely on incoming data that is published infrequently and with long delays. In Kenya, Nikolay Danov, Domenico Giannone, Alain Kabundi, Cédric Okou, and Antonio Spilimbergo develop and evaluate a nowcasting framework that produces real-time estimates of quarterly GDP growth using monthly indicators and digital transaction data. They show that even in a data-constrained environment, a transparent and fully automated model can deliver timely and accurate assessments of current economic conditions – comparable to forecasts produced by institutions relying on both models and judgement.
In Senegal, Malick Dione, Jessica Heckert, Melissa Hidrobo, Agnès Le Port, Amber Peterman, and Moustapha Seye evaluated the popular West African TV series C’est la Vie!, investigating whether the series improved adolescent girls’ and young women’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours with respect to a wide range of themes across violence against women and girls, and sexual and reproductive health. They find promising short- and medium-term impacts on knowledge and attitudes, but no overall impacts on behaviours.
Currency volatility in African markets shapes development outcomes by determining who can access capital and on what terms, with firms in shallow financial markets often forced to choose between expensive local-currency finance and exchange-rate risk from foreign-currency debt. Addressing this requires both better micro-level evidence on how FX risk flows through households, firms, and investors, and policies that can expand financing access without simply redistributing risk. Nicola Limodio, Tommaso Porzio, Awa Ambra Seck, Emmanuel Yimfor, and Anna Kersting explain.
How can cost-effective interventions help improve healthcare in developing countries? Emaan Siddique discusses evidence from 16 countries, shedding light on recent innovations aimed at increasing access and quality.
Elsewhere in development:
- Tobi Lawson on the need for better thinking about human capital.
- Dani Rodrik on how he became a manufacturing skeptic.
- Lelys Dinarte-Diaz on why impact evaluations need implementation research.
- What Ghana's Post-COVID Transformation Programme taught Benjamin Hornsby-Odoi about how quickly big cross-cutting Government initiatives can fail.
- Deena Mousa - We don't know why Malawi is poor.