This week we featured research on fertiliser, inequality, AI and more!
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Across our Ideas in Development series on AI, we spoke with researchers and policymakers on topics relevant to the AI and development debate. In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, we take stock of our main takeaways from these conversations, and explored some of the many unanswered questions.
China has become the largest bilateral creditor to the developing world, yet until recently the full scale of its overseas lending remained hidden from view. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Sebastian Horn discusses the arc of China's sovereign lending – from its extraordinary rise to its abrupt reversal – and what this cycle means for indebted countries today.
In new work, Wyatt Brooks and Kevin Donovan revisit the role of fertiliser subsidies as optimal policy and ask: how should governments respond when fertiliser prices spike? They find that when fertiliser prices spike, farmers in countries dependent on fertiliser imports are hit especially hard, and governments must grapple with a range of trade-offs in how they respond.
South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world despite the end of apartheid thirty years ago. Racial inequalities have declined but these gains have largely benefited a new Black elite. Government redistribution is substantial and has achieved more than standard inequality statistics suggest; however, it still falls short of delivering a truly inclusive and equitable economic transformation. Léo Czajka and Amory Gethin discuss.
Seung-Keun Martinez, Monika Pompeo, Roman Sheremeta, Volodymyr Vakhitov, Matthias Weber, and Nataliia Zaika present evidence from Ukraine, showing that civilians’ failure to evacuate during war is driven mainly by practical barriers rather than psychological resistance – with clear information and organised transport proving more effective than behavioural ‘nudges’ in encouraging people to leave.
In rural Ethiopia, Jessica Leight, Daniel Gilligan, Melissa Hidrobo, Harold Alderman, and Michael Mulford conducted a randomised trial evaluating SPIR (Strengthen PSNP4 Institutions and Resilience), a programme targeting extremely poor households that were already beneficiaries of Ethiopia's main government safety net, the Productive Safety Net Programme. They find modest gains in savings and livestock income but no sustained improvements in consumption or food security, suggesting that smaller transfers and lighter support may be insufficient to help extremely poor households escape poverty, particularly in shock-prone settings.
Critics characterise platform work as exploitative, while defenders characterise it as empowering and innovative – both arguments, however, are typically grounded in anecdotes rather than evidence. To fill this knowledge gap, Achyuta Adhvaryu and Valentina Brailovskaya partnered with leading delivery and ride-hailing platforms in India, Indonesia, and Kenya to understand who the workers are and what platform work actually looks like – the money, hours, costs, and what happens when workers leave. A common thread emerges: the flexibility to work more hours allows drivers to increase their monthly earnings, and, in some contexts, earn more than other in low-skill full-time employment.
Martin Paul Jr. Tabe-Ojong, Ange T. Kakpo, and Jourdain C. Lokossou find that extreme heat in West Africa does not simply reduce farm labour but reshapes household labour allocation – often increasing reliance on women and children and reducing hired labour – while the overall response varies significantly across countries, depending on local economic and institutional conditions.
In the Peruvian Highlands, Katie Bollman, Judhajit Chakraborty, Leah Lakdawala, and Eduardo Nakasone find that extreme cold increases the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV): 10 ‘degree hours’ below -9°C increase the probability that a woman experiences any form of IPV by 0.5 percentage points, and physical violence by 0.3 percentage points. In other words, less than half a day’s -10°C temperatures throughout the year causes an additional one in 200 women to experience IPV.
And check out Oliver Hanney's Substack post - There is no randomising a technological revolution.
No links this week, as Oliver has been busy at the Growth Summit, and Emaan is currently attending PEDL's 15 year conference.