This week we featured research on migration, climate vulnerability, high-speed rail and more!
This week, we released our new VoxDevLit on International Migration. Senior Editor Dean Yang, and Co-Editors Catia Batista, Gaurav Khanna, David McKenzie, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Caroline Theoharides, review research on international migration.
It was also the first proper week of our new podcast, Ideas in Development. In our first episode, Kartik Akileswaran and Oliver Hanney discuss the importance of growth, get into the nitty gritty of growth policy, and preview our series on growth policy. And then, for our second episode, they are joined by the former Minister of Foreign Trade Andrés Valenciano Yamuni to find out how Costa Rica has become a world leader in attracting FDI.
On Tuesday, Sandra Aguilar-Gomez discussed why a one-size-fits-all approach to climate change won’t work in Mexico, where climate adaptation is highly unequal. Currently, private responses such as air conditioning, migration, and financial adjustment play a central role. These mechanisms are often more accessible to higher-income households while exacerbating inequality and shifting climate risks onto poorer, informal, and rural populations, as well as overburdening health, labour, and financial systems.
Despite rapid labour outflows from agriculture and continued urban expansion, China’s agricultural output has remained broadly stable over the past two decades. Xiaoguang Chen, Binlei Gong, Zhilong Qin, and Xiaoli Wang address this puzzle by examining how access to HSR affects agricultural development in rural China. They find that, after gaining HSR access, rural counties experience significant reductions in agricultural labour and cropland; however, they find no evidence that this reduces total agricultural output, due to newfound productivity gains.
In Ethiopia, Girum Abebe, Marcel Fafchamps, Michael Koelle, Simon Quinn, Tom Schwantje, develop a novel methodology to measure managerial traits, defined as the common patterns in a manager’s demonstrated management style. They show that such traits – an important dimension of professional skills – are strongly linked to both socioeconomic background and labour market history.
Internal mobility is a central mechanism through which individuals can respond to local shocks. In Mexico, Aurora Ramírez-Álvarez shows that violence associated with the drug war reshaped internal migration patterns, but not through mass displacement. Instead, violence altered who moves, where they go, and who decides not to move at all – highlighting the welfare costs of violence that are often invisible in standard migration statistics.
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Emily Breza and Supreet Kaur explore what it really means to enter the labour market in a low-income country, and discuss why the experience differs so sharply from richer economies. Their synthesis of the evidence shows that for hundreds of millions of workers, the central challenge is not job choice but job access – work is often rationed, informal, unstable and shaped by day-to-day risks.
Emigration is often feared to negatively affect origin areas through ‘brain drain’, whereby higher-educated workers leave, causing declines in the productivity of the origin areas’ labour markets. However, in Indonesia, David Buller and Marieke Kleemans find that internal migration raises wages and improves access to formal employment for the workers left behind, particularly lower-educated workers, by easing labour supply pressures and reallocating jobs across the formal and informal sector.
Elsewhere in development:
- Lant Pritchett on Substack: The adoption of 'dollar a day' as "the" global poverty line was a massive mistake for development.
- On SSIR, Noam Angrist, Amanda Beatty, Claire Cullen & Tendekai Mukoyi Nkwane discuss how organisations can close the gap between measurement and implementation.
- On CGD, Lee Crawfurd outlines how to do technical assistance well.
- Pranab Bardhan's conversation on Indian political economy with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian.