This week we featured research on jobs in Vietnam, pre-colonial Africa, Colombia coffee, Myanmar's mining ban and more!
Last week, we released our new VoxDevLit on Industrial Development. To accompany this launch, we have organised a series of lectures - in this week's lecture, Jaedo Choi and Michael Sposi reviewed export-led growth and industrial policy. Register here for the final two lectures in March.
Soeren Henn and James Robinson survey the broader scholarly literature on state formation in Africa, showing that it features mechanisms which have not been studied so far in economics. Evidence suggests that Africa succeeded in keeping the scale of political society small. However, this success came with a large number of unintended consequences, including the slave trade, colonialism, and state building.
Under standard conditions in the Colombian coffee sector, the benefits of producing better coffee are not passed on to farmers, weakening their incentives to invest in higher-quality production. However, when a large international buyer required intermediaries to pay farmers higher prices for quality, this solved the hold-up problem, induced upgrading, and increased welfare along the supply chain. Rocco Macchiavello, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Nicolas de Roux, Eric Verhoogen, Mario Bernasconi, and Patrick Farrell explain.
Nan Sandi examines Myanmar’s 2016 mining moratorium, which restricted new licences in an effort to promote more responsible mining. She finds that the mining ban is associated with a substantial reduction in conflict events in mining areas. These effects are concentrated in extreme forms of violence such as armed battles, deadly attacks, violent incidents, and state-perpetrated violence, suggesting an important symmetry in the resource-conflict relationship: just as resource booms fuel violence, deliberate contractions of poorly governed extractive activity can reduce it by a comparable magnitude.
Brian McCaig, Nina Pavcnik, and Woan Foong Wong investigate the long-run employment effects of the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) in Vietnam. They find that US tariff cuts under the BTA led to a large and immediate increase in Vietnamese exports to the US, with industries receiving larger tariff reductions experiencing rapid export growth. These export opportunities are also associated with large employment expansion in the formal manufacturing sector. Domestic firms contributed little to employment growth, with most new affiliates coming from East Asia rather than the US, reflecting the importance of geographic proximity to pre-existing regional supply chains.
Daniel Haanwinckel develops and estimates a structural model of Brazilian local labour markets that brings together changes in education, labour demand, and the minimum wage in a setting where firms have wage-setting power. He finds that rising education explains none of the fall in wage inequality in the formal sector; instead, the action comes from labour-demand shocks and minimum wage increases.
Richard Akresh, Damien de Walque, Harounan Kazianga, and Abigail Stocker present medium-term results from a randomised controlled trial of a government-run integrated social safety net programme operated at scale in Burkina Faso focusing on child development, which included cash transfers, information meetings, and home visits. They find the largest positive lasting impacts when home visits are added to cash plus information meetings, observing significant effects on pregnancy, home behaviours, education, and strengths and difficulties indices.
Despite decades of reform, China's domestic market remains surprisingly disintegrated, with local protectionism generating substantial welfare losses, Jingcheng Jiang shows that China's bureaucratic promotion system, often credited with driving economic growth, is itself a major source of this fragmentation. When local leaders compete for career advancement, they strategically restrict trade that benefits their political rivals.
In this week’s episode of Economics Unpacked, Rohini Pande and Daniel Xu examine the theory and real-world evidence behind carbon offset markets – from the Clean Development Mechanism in China to today’s voluntary carbon markets.
And on Ideas in Development, Utkarsh Saxena, Claire Cullen and Niriksha Shetty discuss how their organisations, Adalat AI, Youth Impact, and Precision Development, are already deploying AI in India and what they’ve learned during the process. On VoxDevTalks, Michael Greenstone discusses a groundbreaking experiment in Gujarat, India, that tested whether emissions trading could work in a developing country context – and what happened when it did.
Elsewhere in development:
- The ReCIPE programme is offering a second part of the free virtual course on "Key Concepts for Economies in Conflict and Fragile Settings" for the spring of 2026 - register here.
- On the Markus Academy YouTube: Challenges and Opportunities for India with V. Anantha Nageswaran.
- On CGD, Shanta Devarajan and Eeshani Kandpal write The World Bank Doesn’t Need to Generate More Knowledge. It Needs to Want It.
- And Mahima Gunapooti, David Evans and Gabriela Smarrelli discuss what we are learning about the impacts of and solutions to school-related violence.