This week we featured research on saving lives, paying taxes, building roads and more!
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Laura Derksen, Anita McGahan, and Leandro Pongeluppe demonstrate that the implementation of an electronic medical records (EMR) system in Malawi’s HIV clinics has saved thousands of lives by improving clinic efficiency. EMRs help clinic staff trace lapsed patients and manage larger patient volumes.
In Brazil, Michael Best, Luigi Caloi, François Gerard, Evan Plous Kresch, Joana Naritomi, and Laura Zoratto observe that taxpayers respond not only to how much they are taxed, but also to whether the system feels fair: inequities created by crude tax proxies can reduce compliance as much as high rates themselves. Better data and technology can help states improve fairness in taxation – and eventually compliance and revenue.
Tasso Adamopoulos finds that Ethiopia’s large-scale road expansion cut travel times to markets – boosting farm productivity, reshaping cropping patterns, and accelerating structural change.
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Adrien Bilal discusses a new, wide-ranging review of macroeconomics and climate change. The conversation surveys what economists now know about climate damages, mitigation and adaptation, why LMICs face distinctive risks, and where the biggest evidence gaps remain.
In rural India, extreme heat damages crops and increases the number of strongly undernourished households in terms of calories, iron, and other nutrients. While some households cope by buying food grown elsewhere, the poorest remain highly vulnerable. Paul Stainier, Manisha Shah, and Alan Barreca discuss.
Evidence from India suggests that women tend to wake earlier and eat later than men, leading to reduced sleep, leisure, and social time – which worsens physical and mental health outcomes. Udayan Rathore shows that disparities persist across economic groups, remain largely unaffected by women’s paid work, and are exacerbated in more patriarchal districts, underscoring the need for structural changes and supportive policies beyond economic progress alone.
Drawing on a randomised controlled trial among rice farmers in Nigeria, Jeffrey Bloem and Clark Lundberg introduce a new method for linking village-level interventions with high-resolution earth observation data – which captures spatial variation in how new technologies spread and influence land use. While the adoption of improved fertiliser boosted agricultural productivity, the effects on tree canopy cover depended on the local landscape.
Despite recent gains due to rural self-employment, India’s female labour force participation remains constrained by entrenched social norms and a limited availability of quality jobs – keeping the gender gap in work persistently wide. Farzana Afridi reflects.
No discipline has a monopoly on high-quality, policy-relevant research. Managing Editor Oliver Hanney describes how development economists are increasingly teaming up with other fields to improve the relevance of their research.
Oliver Hanney has also updated his one-stop shop for accessible resources related to development economics.
Elsewhere in development:
- Adam Salisbury has written about Why Governments Can’t Count.
- Charles Kenny on the current global status of PEPFAR delivery.
- Biniam Bedasso and Donald Bundy on the need for new evidence on school meal programmes in developing countries.
- Hannah Ritchie on why China's use of fertilisers peaked a decade ago.
- Paddy Carter writes about international corporate bonds in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Charlene Peters Chen has summarised Ezrah's thinking and funding on AI for Development.
- Jishnu Das has written about what’s going right with development economics.
- Arvind on AI discusses what happens if there's an AI crash?
- Pranab Bardhan has a conversation with Dani Rodrik on global economic challenges.
- The Global Aid Policy team at Open Philanthropy is hiring a Program Associate.
- Hirwa Hans describes a few things that are working well in Africa.
- Technology over the long run - Max Roser zooms out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime.
- And the TIDE Centre at the University of Oxford has a great new video on Ibn Khaldun and the Origins of Economics.