VoxDev Development Economics

Does who you vote for influence the chances that you are hired, fired, and promoted? Edoardo Teso tells Tim Phillips about Brazil’s politically polarised labour market.

Almost 2 billion people don’t have access to clean water, which means increased risk of disease, especially for young children. Pascaline Dupas tells Tim Phillips how an experiment in Malawi that provided access to the chemicals to treat dirty water may save lives in many other countries too.

Do policies to provide women with financial resources or financial services give them more economic independence? Less often than we would like, Mikaela Rabb tells Tim Phillips.

If weak states fail to provide order and security, sometimes criminal gangs step in. Can this problem be fixed by targeting resources to the places most in need of help, and what happens when we do? Ben Lessing tells Tim Phillips about a project to do this in Colombia’s second largest city.

By 2030, half the world’s poor will be living in conflict-affected areas. Could some of the resources dedicated to helping them be spent to prevent those conflicts? Thiemo Fetzer of the University of Warwick tells Tim Phillips how providing workfare in India reduced community violence.

For small farmers the most difficult months of the years are the “hungry season” before the harvest. What would be the effect of a small loan at this time? A program in Zambia tweaked the rules of microfinance. Günther Fink and Kelsey Jack tell Tim Phillips about what happened.

In the monsoon season of 2020, 5.5 million people in Bangladesh were affected by severe floods. But the UN was able to help thousands of households by sending them cash before the floods hit. Ashley Pople and Ruth Hill tell Tim Phillips about the situations in which anticipatory transfers might work better than conventional disaster response.

When households escape poverty, how likely is it they will fall back in the future? Loki Phadera of the World Bank and Hope Michelson of the University of Illinois explain to Tim Phillips why measuring resilience can give us a new perspective on how well anti-poverty programs are working – if only we can agree how to do it.

Children in low-income countries are 12 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than those in high-income countries. Cash transfers to households may increase money spent on the health of children – but how large are the outcomes, and should the transfers specifically target child health? Anupama Dathan talks to Tim Phillips.

Which interventions work best, and how can we tweak them to work better? How well could they work in other places, and what changes should we make? Airbel Impact Lab, part of the International Rescue Committee, designs, tests, and scales life-changing solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. Tim Phillips talks to Jeannie Annan and Caitlin Tulloch about their work.