This week we featured research on a new measure of poverty, slums and more!
We are excited to introduce our new video series, Economics Unpacked. In our first episode, Susan Parker and Joana Naritomi discuss Progresa in Mexico, and Bolsa Familia in Brazil. Moving forwards, each episode will cover an important economic policy with leading experts.
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, Kartik Akileswaran and Oliver Hanney speak with Madame Pham Chi Lan, former Secretary General of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and long‑time economic adviser to Vietnam’s leadership during key reform years. This episode covers how Vietnam built a market economy from scratch, the hardships caused by decades of conflict and isolation, the Doi Moi reforms, and the other key legal and institutional changes that allowed private enterprise to flourish.
And on VoxDevTalks, Hope Michelson discusses a critical but often overlooked piece of the agricultural productivity puzzle in sub-Saharan Africa: agricultural input markets. While decades of research and policy have focused on farmer behaviour and demand-side constraints, Michelson and her co-authors argue that the supply side – the markets and firms that provide seeds, fertilisers and pesticides – deserves far more attention.
Global poverty trends look radically different depending on the poverty line used. Olivier Sterck proposes a new measure of income poverty, one that doesn’t depend on ‘lines’, and instead uses the average time needed to earn a dollar – which shows that global poverty has fallen sharply, by about 55% since 1990. This was driven mainly by income growth in East Asia.
Paul Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Raimundo Undurraga, and Joaquin A. Urrego study two slum renewal policies in the Chilean context: in-situ upgrading and population relocation. Their results indicate that in-situ upgrading yields meaningful reductions in crime across multiple categories in neighbouring formal neighbourhoods, while simultaneously stimulating housing investment. Population relocation interventions, on the other hand, do not generate these positive spillovers.
Kate Ambler, Kelly Jones, and Michael O’Sullivan find that formally including Ugandan women in commercial agriculture – through contract ownership or behaviour-change interventions – can increase women’s empowerment without reducing productivity, with positive spillovers for household welfare and gender relations.
Given varied reproductive health behaviours across countries, migration may also influence family planning decisions in the origin country. Susan Godlonton and Caroline Theoharides explore the role of migrant's exposure to different reproductive health policies on fertility and other reproductive health decisions in the Philippines. They find that fertility falls in response to larger reductions in legal restrictions regarding reproductive health in migrants’ destinations through the diffusion of knowledge, preferences, and behaviour.
Rana Hendy discusses how Egypt’s persistently low female labour force participation does not reflect a lack of education, but rather structural barriers – segmented labour demand, heavy unpaid care burdens, restrictive social norms, and weak policy enforcement. These barriers prevent women’s educational gains from translating into sustained employment.
Ankush Asri, Viola Asri, and Anke Hoeffler evaluate a school-based career exploration programme in urban India, primarily engaging female students from low-income households. While the programme raised aspirations and confidence by improving access to information and role models, persistent structural constraints prevented these gains from translating into medium-term behavioural change.
In India, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin studied a large-scale citizen training programme designed to improve waste segregation at source. Crucially, the intervention went beyond passive information provision: trainers demonstrated how to segregate waste in practice, explained how segregation affects landfill operations and environmental outcomes, and helped households set up waste management routines in their homes. This increased waste segregation by 4.5–6 percentage points among treated households, an increase of roughly 50% relative to baseline levels.
Elsewhere in development:
- Oliver Hanney on the future of communicating science.
- Ken Opalo on why the international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts.
- David Nash on how aid may misallocate local talent.
- On J-PAL, Ying Gao and Devin Chesney argue that to boost jobs in low- and middle-income countries, support more than just entrepreneurs.
And finally, The Economic Misfit have a call for job market candidates to share a non-technical summary of their job market papers. Email [email protected] if you're interested.