This week we featured research on street harassment, the legacy of conflict, entrepreneurship & more...
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Trust underpins economic transactions, social interactions, and the overall cohesion of communities. But what happens to trust when it’s shaken by something as devastating as a civil war? Yesterday, Niklas Buehren, Markus Goldstein, Imran Rasul and Andrea Smurra outline how the civil war in Sierra Leone changed the way trust was formed.
Ensuring an accessible and affordable electricity supply is crucial for a country's development. However, in many developing nations, electricity remains unaffordable for a significant portion of the population. What factors contribute to this lack of affordability? How does this coexist with large unused capacity? In this week's VoxDevTalks episode, Tim Phillips spoke to Sugandha Srivastav about how corruption and incompetence in designing power contracts has led to huge economic costs in Pakistan.
Entrepreneurship is a fundamental input to the economy, with new businesses creating jobs, enhancing competition, and spurring innovation. Interventions like microfinance schemes and basic business training programmes have been implemented in hopes of stimulating new enterprises. In today's article, Matthew Pecenco, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla and Hamilton Taveras explore how providing temporary managerial jobs in the Dominican Republic—a scheme different from those prevalent in the literature and policy practice—affects business creation.
To mark the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, Monday and Tuesday's articles explored two potential policy solutions:
- Sofia Amaral, Girija Borker, Anjani Kumar, Nathan Fiala, Nishith Prakash and Maria Micaela Sviatschi explore how increasing police presence and visibility helped tackle harassment in the streets of Hyderabad.
- Sofia Amaral, Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos, Sarita Oré and Maria Micaela Sviatschi outlined how an intervention training teachers in Mozambique helped combat Gender-Based Violence.
Alongside these two articles on Gender-Based Violence in schools and street harassment in India, Deputy Managing Editor Paola Davila wrote a blog outlining the evidence on VoxDev about the causes, impacts and potential policy solutions to Gender-Based Violence.
Matt Clancy and Open Philanthropy are also launching living literature reviews - it is nice to see this format gathering momentum! Matt has written about training scientists in low and middle-income countries for his own living review, and Lauren Gilbert has just started a new review of migration, first post here.
Elsewhere, there was lots of interesting reading and watching:
- Mike Callen discusses how aid can reach vulnerable women in Afghanistan in this video.
- I enjoyed this blog post by Han Sheng Chia on whether generative AI can enable the scale up of personalised interventions.
- Also on AI, David Yanagizawa-Drott is presenting on AI opportunities for the Global South in this CEPR event.
- On the same day, Stefan Dercon is discussing South Africa's gamble on economic development and inclusion.
- Oliver Kim has written about how reliable GDP statistics in developing countries are.
- Kennedy Phiri and Freddie Clayton write for YaleEnvironment360 about Zambia's pivot to solar after an unprecedented drought.
- Tom Ough writes on Works in Progress about another form of renewable energy, and the challenges of reaching it.
- There were some great job market posts on the WB Dev Impact blog, outlining work on the allocation of labour in Africa by Samuel Marshall, and masculinity norms in school by Ieda Matavelli.
- On ODI, Israel Bikorimana, Harshil Parekh, Romal Sanjeeda outline seven key lessons for practitioners from Rwanda's experience embedding tax expenditure reporting.
Two great podcasts:
- On Ideas Untrapped, Jishnu Das and James Habyarimana join Tobi Lawson to discuss education, health and economic development.
- On ODI, Sara Pantuliano, Nilima Gulrajani, Heba Aly, Fadhel Kaboub and Omar Bargawi discuss the role donors should play in a post-aid world.
Plus the following opportunities:
- The World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program has opened to citizens of certain developing countries who are applying to a master's degree program in a development-related topic.
- The IFC are hiring an Economist for the Economics and Market Research Department.
We will be back on Monday with a full week of content on cash transfers, firms in fragile contexts and more!