Economic research that VoxDev has featured in 2024 has yielded interesting insights on false narratives in international migration discourse, fertility and family planning, attendance vs learning in education, and more!
Here are some standout takeaways from the broad range of research in low- and middle-income countries I have come across in 2024. This includes surprising findings that push back on common narratives in development. Others come from our VoxDevLits, which synthesise evidence across studies, and general trends in the discipline that are providing new insights.
1. Evidence alone changes nothing.
One statistic stuck out from our recent podcast covering Ugo Gentilini’s excellent new book on the history of cash transfers. He found that over the past 40 years, approximately 1.4 million papers have been written on cash transfers. All of that time, funding and effort later, we are still having some of the same discussions as the Ancient Greeks.
Unless we communicate evidence clearly and effectively, policymakers won’t act on it, policy will not change, and debates are stuck. Earlier this year, Eva Vivalt offered advice to researchers on how to present their insights. The way evidence is generated also matters. Alix Bonargent showed that collaborative projects with policymakers have more influence on policy. And as Stefan Dercon emphasises, researchers should account for policymakers’ constraints when giving advice
Clearly presented evidence, that involves policymakers in the research process and accounts for their constraints, has a greater chance of driving change.
2. Supporting economic growth abroad won’t reduce immigration, it will probably increase it.
New data from 99 developing countries challenges the conventional wisdom in policy circles that investing in and promoting economic development will reduce migration. Clemens and Mendola present evidence that, in fact, the opposite is true. Rising incomes in lower-income countries lead more people to emigrate. Other evidence on VoxEU, which looks directly at the impact of foreign aid on migration, supports this conclusion.
The commonly used justification of foreign aid as a means to reduce international migration is therefore flawed. While this might be a politically appealing soundbite in the short term, it could undermine long-term support of foreign aid which simply won’t reduce migration.
3. Brain drain? Not in the Philippines.
Brain drain, the hypothesis that poor countries lose crucial skilled workers due to international migration, is also a popular narrative in policy discussions on international migration. Evidence presented on VoxDev this year shows that these fears are not borne out in the data. Abarcar and Theoharides show that the Philippines actually experienced a brain gain effect. Improved opportunities for nurses to migrate abroad increased the supply of trained nurses at home.
Also, in the longer term, Khanna, Murathanoglu, Theoharides and Yang find that income increases for international migrants from the Philippines actually fostered economic development and investments in education in their local communities at home.
4. Understanding the drivers of high fertility in Africa sheds light on effective population policies.
Fertility in Africa remains high. One potential explanation is that women would like to have fewer children, but don’t have access to contraception. Dupas, Jayachandran, Lleras-Muney and Rossi put this to the test in rural Burkina Faso, where they provided free access to all modern contraceptive products for three years. But they find no detectable effects of this comprehensive intervention, suggesting that fertility levels are in line with what families want.
So why do women want many children? Other evidence from Africa, pooling data from six experimental evaluations in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Togo, finds that development programmes which increase women’s earnings and household wealth increase fertility (Donald et al. 2024). This finding on the relationship between income and fertility for adult women, who are already married and already working, suggests that fertility increases are a means to safeguard long-term economic security. Rossi’s evidence from Namibia supports this idea, where expanded social pensions (providing long-term economic security) in the 1990s resulted in a rapid and substantial decline in fertility.
5. There are large benefits of providing school meals.
There is growing evidence on the significant benefits of providing school meals through school feeding programmes. Evidence from Colombia shows a school feeding programme in public schools contributed to long-term education success by fostering learning, and boosting high school graduation and tertiary enrolment. This builds on growing evidence around the world. Midday meals in India improved learning outcomes, and school feeding programmes in Burkina Faso boosted attendance.
6. The crucial next step for global education: We are boosting attendance, now we need to boost learning.
A range of policies, including free school meals and also conditional cash transfers (e.g. in Morocco and Nicaragua), have helped countries make huge strides in getting children into schools.
Despite all of this progress, there is still a global learning crisis. We need to get children learning whilst they are in school, and there is a growing body of evidence on policies that can achieve this goal, some of which we have featured on VoxDev.
7. Agriculture in Africa is lying dormant.
Wollburg, Bentze, Lu, Udry and Gollin show that smallholder crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa are falling. Our VoxDevLit further highlights that technological progress and innovation has stagnated in Africa.
So what can policy do? There are potentially some quick wins. For example, farmers in Ethiopia often don’t know what type of seeds they are planting, leading to them applying suboptimal amounts of fertiliser. This might seem like a small-scale inefficiency, but Gollin, Bohr, Deisemann, Kosmowski and Lybbert find it aggregates to a substantial misallocation of resources at the national level.
In the longer term, as Senior Editor Chris Udry noted in his recent presentation to the Chief Economists of Government Network, policymakers need to change the profitability equation for farmers. On the benefits side, the extremely low levels of R&D in African agriculture need to be rectified and more investment is needed in technologies that are customisable to local contexts. On the cost side, farmers are held back by extremely high fertiliser prices.
8. Adapting to, and mitigating, climate change at the same time.
A key point highlighted by our VoxDevLit on Climate Adaptation is that low incomes are one of the key constraints to climate adaptation. Any change in the policy focus on, and funding towards, eliminating global poverty has important implications for the ability of communities to adapt to climate change.
Pagel and Sileci showed one way governments could remove carbon and reduce poverty all at once. The National Greening Program, a large-scale tree planting programme in the Phillipines, sequestered carbon, created jobs and reduced poverty. Climate mitigation can be done in tandem with poverty reduction, which itself will aid climate adaption. In fact, as Rohini Pande noted in our podcast series with Yale EGC, given that aid budgets are under pressure, voluntary carbon markets could channel significant funds to low-income countries, if designed well.
9. Economists are getting back to the bigger questions, with a better toolkit.
Over the past few years, I have increasingly come across papers using experimental methods to answer bigger questions. Whether that’s through much larger scale experiments than were previously possible, or by pairing the causal inference toolkit with macro modelling (as discussed in our podcast on how economists can bridge the “micro-macro divide”). Here are some examples from 2024 of how researchers have been doing this:
- A growing body of research uses experimental methods to study institutional quality and change.
- Unlocking the economic potential of female entrepreneurship
- Scaling up information interventions in education
- The lifetime benefits of the New Deal’s youth employment programme
- Emergency loans promote climate change adaptation and can be profitable for microfinance institutions
10. AI, development economics and policy.
After experiencing the productivity benefits of AI myself in 2024, I hope that 2025 can be the year that we start to generate some initial evidence on how it can be used to promote economic development. Here is what we could see in 2025:
- Significant impacts on the productivity of researchers, and the number of questions they are able to answer – there are lot of key questions for policy where more research is needed.
- The first wave of a huge number of AI-related RCT’s beginning to emerge across a range of policy areas including education, health, microenterprises, agriculture.
- And in the meantime, a significant growth in big-picture policy conservations about how AI will transform development before we have enough evidence.
If you are a researcher, practitioner or policymaker who has not yet played around with generative AI, I would recommend forcing yourself to use one of the free models for an hour or so, testing its capabilities. For some tips for researchers, check out this presentation on how researchers and students in low- and middle-income countries use generative AI for economic research.
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