This week we featured research on growth, protests, agricultural productivity and more!
Courts in many parts of the Global South face conditions radically different from those in which western models of judicial fairness were developed. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Fiona Shen-Bayh discusses a new review of the empirical research, arguing that the standard criteria for evaluating courts – impartiality, neutrality, and consistency – reflect the particular history of advanced industrialised democracies and may lead to the wrong conclusions when applied elsewhere. The conversation covers non-state justice systems, authoritarian courts, political instability, and the possibilities for reform grounded in local context.
On Monday, Jaedo Choi, Andrei Levchenko, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Younghun Shim revisited one of the most spectacular growth episodes of the twentieth century – South Korea’s growth miracle between 1972 and 2011 – using historical firm-level data covering this time horizon for the first time. During this time, they find that firm concentration rose sharply, with the largest firms powering the rise in concentration and contributing to the growth miracle.
In Côte d'Ivoire, Esther Mirjam Girsberger and Romuald Méango find that public sector jobs attract highly skilled graduates not primarily through wages but through non-wage amenities such as job security, lower stress, and predictable working conditions. This creates a costly outside option for private firms, suggesting that policies to boost private sector growth should focus on improving job quality and reducing information gaps rather than wages alone.
Nigeria’s agricultural productivity deficit stems from overlapping institutional failures across seed supply, credit, insurance, extension, market access, and land tenure that collectively prevent smallholder farmers from adopting or benefiting from technologies that demonstrably work. Addressing these constraints requires coordinated investment in farmer identification systems, seed certification, and climate-adaptive tools, sustained across complex federal governance architecture. Khadijat Busola Amolegbe explains.
Given that a major stated driver of citizen participation in protests like those in the Occupy Movement is demand for economic redistribution, can protests actually lead to meaningful redistribution of economic resources? Belinda Archibong, Chinemelu Okafor, Evans Osabuohien, and Tom Moerenhout answer this question using 26 years of archival public finance data from Nigeria and show that protests increase fiscal transfers to protesting regions – but only in areas where state and federal governments are politically aligned, meaning the state governor and federal president belong to the same party. Where they are not politically aligned, protests are met with increased policing and violence rather than fiscal concession.
South Africa provides one of the best-known examples of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Established after apartheid, it invited victims to testify publicly about human rights abuses, while perpetrators could apply for amnesty in exchange for full disclosure. In recent work, Thomas Gautier, Daniela Horta-Saenz, and Gianluca Russo study whether South Africa’s TRC strengthened social cohesion, and whether those effects later shaped economic policy. They find that the TRC reduced violence and built national identity among Black South Africans, but also make the country more racially segregated, while making firms more likely to dodge redistribution obligations.
In Afghanistan, Sarah Langlotz examines the impact of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – one of the largest military coalitions in NATO's history – on community cohesion, between 2005 and 2010. In areas that the ISAF mandate was extended to, she finds that households were significantly less likely to receive help from others across multiple measures of assistance, and less likely to have a family member participating in a local council. Over the period of country-wide operational intensification, however, the picture regarding mutual assistance within communities is more mixed.
Despite contributing nearly a quarter of GDP and employing half the workforce, Khadijat Busola Amolegbe explains that Nigeria's agricultural sector is trapped in low productivity by mutually reinforcing barriers: dysfunctional seed systems, credit market exclusion, absent farmer registries, and federal–state coordination failures. Closing these gaps requires not piecemeal programmes but systemic investment in identification infrastructure, pluralistic seed supply, and risk-sharing mechanisms capable of reaching the most constrained smallholders.
Elsewhere in development:
- Coefficient Giving is requesting proposals for projects related to "global health and wellbeing in an era of transformative AI".
- Pranab Bardhan and Raghuram Rajan discuss the international economic order.
- The Economics of Environment and Energy Programme (EEE), the Global School of Sustainability (GSoS) and the International Growth Centre (IGC) within LSE are convening the fifth Environment Week at the LSE on 21-24 September. Submit your paper here.