VoxDev Development Economics

Devesh Kapur, a professor at Johns Hopkins and co-author of *A Sixth of Humanity*, and Arvind Subramanian, former Chief Economic Advisor to India and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, dive into India's unique development journey. They explore how India's democratic struggles shaped policy, the impact of state-led planning, and the dual narratives of rapid growth and rising inequality. Their insights reveal the significance of regional analysis in development and caution against moves away from India’s secular foundations, emphasizing the lessons for global growth.

Policymakers and politicians like to talk about creating infrastructure like roads, schools and transport systems: how it grows the economy, provides jobs, and strengthens domestic firms. But that infrastructure needs raw materials, people and constructors to create it. Martina Kirchberger of Trinity College Dublin is an expert on how stuff gets built in developing countries. Are the materials they need expensive? Will a construction boom also create jobs? Are there local firms who can do the work and, if not, who makes projects happen in the global construction sector? She talks to Tim Phillips about investment, partnership, and the surprising cost of cement. 

Everywhere, women’s labour force participation is lower than men’s. There are many reasons to close this gap, but there are just as many reasons why it’s hard to do it. Research is discovering new and important insights into how financial constraints, social norms, the backlash from man and the problems of travelling safely reduce the opportunities to work from home. But which policies can change this? Release 2 of the VoxDev Lit on Female Labour Force Participation sets out this research, and Rachel Heath of the University of Washington tells Tim Phillips what it tells us about how work helps women, and policy helps women to find work. 

When children are victims of bullying or social exclusion at school, it can be devastating for every part of their lives. This is a global problem, but with a global solution: if we can teach kids about empathy, self-control, or the effects of their violent behaviour, it can reduce bullying. How well do these policies work, and can they be scaled up successfully?  JPAL is about to publish a policy insight on this topic, bringing together the research and summarising what we know. Sule Alan of Cornell University tells Tim Phillips about how we can spot bullying and exclusion in the classroom, and the interventions that work.

Adrien Bilal, an Economist at Stanford University specializing in the macroeconomic impacts of climate change, joins the discussion. He highlights the challenges of modeling economic activity's influence on the environment. Topics include the macro costs of carbon pricing, the risks of carbon leakage, and the need for better adaptation research. Bilal also emphasizes the importance of granular data and addressing non-market impacts, such as mortality and instability, in the face of rising climate extremes and shifting migration patterns.

In this enlightening discussion, Natalie Bau, a UCLA professor specializing in the economics of education, and Sara Lowes, a UC San Diego professor focused on political economy, explore the critical relationship between culture and economic development. They reveal how cultural norms can significantly shape policy effectiveness and outcomes. By analyzing case studies from countries like Indonesia and Ghana, they highlight the potential pitfalls of ignoring local beliefs. They also stress the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to bridge cultural insights with economic strategies.

With record levels of armed conflict around the world in recent years, the study of conflict has gone from being a niche corner of economics into a thriving discipline that learns from, and interacts with, development economics. Rigorous empirical research on conflict is, however, relatively recent.  The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme aims to provide a better understanding of the links between conflicts, economic growth, and public policies. this week we speak to Dominic Rohner (Geneva Graduate Institute), the Research Director of the programme, and Oliver Vanden Eynde (Paris School of Economics), the Head of Engagement about their new research that attempts to link the attributes of countries to the types of conflict they experience, how economic methods can advance our knowledge of conflict and the policies to reduce it, and what the work of ReCIPE can do to influence policy around conflict and development. 

Johan Swinnen, Director General of IFPRI, and Purnima Menon, Senior Research Fellow, delve into pressing food policy issues. They discuss the evolution of global food security, highlighting successes and setbacks over the past 50 years. The impact of climate change on food systems and the importance of resilience are explored, especially for marginalized groups. Urbanization's effects on food access, particularly for the urban poor, are examined. They also address the manipulation of food access in conflict zones and stress the need for innovative solutions and equity in food value chains.

What happens from the moment goods are manufactured or harvested, until they are bought by consumers? As we know from experience, most of the things we consume reach us having been bought and sold, sometimes many times, by intermediaries – most of us don’t order a phone from the factory. Many interventions designed to increase the welfare of consumers in developing economies are designed to shorten these supply chains by cutting out those traders in the middle. But what happens when you do that in the real world?  Meredith Startz of Dartmouth College tells Tim Phillips why the story of what intermediaries deliver, and even their effect on the prices consumers pay, is more nuanced than our economic models often suggest. 

Like all of us, healthcare providers bring their biases to work. But if those biases result in a reduced level of care for their patients, how can we correct them?  An innovative experiment in three very different countries attempted to reduce bias in contraceptive care for women. Zachary Wagner of USC and Manisha Shah of UC Berkeley were two of a multidisciplinary team that implemented program and evaluated the results. They talk to Tim Phillips about how biases shape contraceptive care, the methods that can help us to understand why they arise, and the challenges of creating a program that can work in different cultural and religious settings.