This week we featured research on aid, debt crises, 'bad' oil and more!
In our new podcast Ideas in Development, as part of our series on growth policy, Kartik Akileswaran and Oliver Hanney talked with Peru’s former Minister of Production, Piero Ghezzi, about the tools Peru used to become a global leader in exporting high-value fruits and vegetables, including the experimental industrial policy tool at the heart of this story: the Mesas Ejecutivas (executive round tables).
And in this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Lant Pritchett discusses one of the most pressing challenges in global development today, the learning crisis, and why we need to rethink education policy for low- and middle-income countries after decades of mixed results.
Jacob Moscona investigates whether the management of aid design and delivery systematically mediates the relationship between aid and conflict, focusing on all World Bank projects to Africa. He finds that well-managed aid projects reduce local conflict while poorly-managed projects do the opposite.
Senegal enters 2026 with a soaring public debt and very limited degrees of freedom. So, what should the government do? Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Martin Kessler discuss navigating Senegal's unexpected debt crisis, and weigh up the two possible paths Senegal faces.
Since the 1992 Earth Summit, oil producers have largely overlooked variations in carbon intensity related to extraction and refining. Renaud Coulomb, Fanny Henriet, and Léo Reitzmann indicate this oversight has significant climate consequences: between 1992 and 2018 alone, if global oil production had been reallocated to minimise total social cost, taking into account both producer extraction costs and GHG emissions, without reducing overall annual production levels, nearly 10 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions could have been avoided.
A broad consensus has emerged among policymakers and scholars alike that the key to reducing gender gaps in the labour market lies in improving workplace conditions, or ‘amenities’, for women. In Brazil, Viola Corradini, Lorenzo Lagos, and Garima Sharma found that prioritising women in collective bargaining led unions to expand female-friendly workplace amenities, increasing women’s retention and productivity without reducing wages, employment, or firm profits.
Scott Orr and Mokhtar Tabari explain that import competition from China can increase productivity among Indian firms - not by lowering costs, but by encouraging innovation through quality upgrading.
Yoko Okuyama showed that women-targeted radio programmes in Occupied Japan increased women’s political participation and accelerated fertility decline, but had no effect on women’s employment, highlighting both the potential and the limits of mass media as a tool for post-conflict empowerment.
Raoul van Maarseveen finds that children in African cities have consistently better educational outcomes than their rural counterparts, with evidence showing that growing up in urban areas causally improves schooling attainment, primarily due to better access to education rather than household demand or income effects.
In India, Zuheir Desai, Sergio Montero, and Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra study the effects of gender quotas in urban local government on accountability. Although they find that women councillors outperform men, gender quotas actually reduce overall voter welfare as deep-seated discrimination against women outweighs policy gains – highlighting the need for alternative policy designs that can improve both representation and welfare.
There's a growing body of evidence on the common misperceptions people have about the world. And it turns out that, across a bunch of different settings, correcting those misperceptions seems to be a very cheap way of improving society. Oliver Hanney updates his blog on common misperceptions about the world.
Elsewhere in development:
- Mutual Interest Development Cooperation: Aligning Incentives in a Fragmenting World - a new report by Tobias Heidland, Moritz Schularick and Rainer Thiele.
- Theo Mitchell and Lee Crawfurd find that battery recycling is a far bigger source of lead exposure than we thought.
- On the CGD Podcast: Can Venezuela’s Economy Recover? Dany Bahar and Liliana Rojas-Suarez discuss with David Evans.
- On IGC, Aleta Starosta, Shahrukh Wani, and Stephen Jackson discuss strengthening the hidden infrastructure of public health through AI.
And some opportunities:
- The Weiss Fund Fellowship provides supplementary financial support for exceptional job market PhD candidates accepting positions in Weiss Fund-eligible countries and doing work aligned with the Weiss Fund’s mission and objectives.
- Kelsey Jack and Manisha Shah, affiliated with CEGA, are hiring an outstanding predoc (Junior or Assistant Specialist) to support empirical analysis and administration for rigorous impact evaluations in Uganda, India and South Africa.