This week we featured research on women's mobility, test scores, global hunger and more!
On Wednesday, we released our new VoxDevLit on Industrial Development, for which an amazing team of researchers summarised everything you need to know about industrialisation. To accompany this launch, we have organised a series of lectures - in the first lecture, Bruno Caprettini and Luis Felipe Sáenz discussed all things structural transformation. Register here for the upcoming lectures over the next month.
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, Deena Mousa and Oliver Hanney were joined by Anton Korinek to think like an economist about AI and labour markets, and discuss whether our current economic paradigm will hold up as AI moves from being a tool to a coworker.
And on VoxDevTalks, Gaurav Khanna discussed the rise of high-skilled migration from Asia to the US. Drawing on his new paper, Khanna explains how Asian migrants have become central to US technology, healthcare, and higher education – and why current policy debates could have far-reaching consequences.
Women’s participation in skills training Pakistan is constrained primarily by social and safety barriers, rather than preferences or the ability to monetise skills. To study these barriers at scale, Ali Cheema, Asim Khwaja, Farooq Naseer, and Jacob Shapiro implement a skills training programme that randomly allocated training centres across villages. They find that these barriers cannot simply be overcome by compensating travel costs; instead, effective policy must recognise socially driven mobility constraints, including concerns about women’s safety in public spaces, as a central barrier.
Using high-frequency data from a large early childhood intervention in China, James Heckman and Jin Zhou indicate that skills develop through the emergence of qualitatively new abilities and stochastic fluctuations, rather than as higher levels of a fixed trait, challenging the practice of treating test scores as comparable measures of the same underlying ability across levels.
Hope Michelson, Erin Lentz, Chungmann Kim, and Kathy Baylis find that the leading global early warning system for acute food insecurity systematically underestimates the scale of crisis-level hunger, missing around one in five people affected. As a result, global assessments significantly understate the scope of global humanitarian need, with serious consequences for the timing and adequacy of aid to vulnerable populations.
Julian Ashwin, Vijayendra Rao, Monica Biradavolu, Aditya Chhabra, Arshia Haque, Afsana Khan, and Nandini Krishnan show how open-ended interviews can be analysed at scale, combining the depth of qualitative research with the statistical power economists expect. Using over 2,200 conversational interviews with Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts in Cox’s Bazar, they uncover dimensions of aspiration that standard surveys systematically miss.
Disaster relief can discourage people from adapting to future disasters, for example, by reducing incentives to relocate. But in low-income settings, cash relief can also ease liquidity constraints and enable adaptation. In the context of Pakistan’s 2010 floods, Muhammad Bin Khalid and Martin Mattsson show that both of these forces exist but that they offset each other, so that cash relief does not cause more people to stay in disaster-prone areas.
In this week’s episode of Economics Unpacked, we look at the real evidence behind SEZs. Drawing on research from Vietnam and Indonesia, we speak with economists Tevin Tafese and Alex Rothenberg on whether Special Economic Zones shift workers into better-paid manufacturing jobs – and whether those benefits spread more widely across the economy.
It's been one of our busiest ever weeks at VoxDev. If you're still looking for content after our VoxDevLit, five articles, two podcasts, video, and online lecture, then we'd highly recommend (as always) Ken Opalo's latest Substack post on how African policymakers should prepare for the coming commodity boom.