Sign up to here to receive this weekly newsletter and updates on our upcoming VoxDevLit launch events straight to your inbox.
Another busy week here at VoxDev with our new VoxDevLit, a launch event, four articles and a podcast. We will stay busy in the run up to our Christmas break, from December 21st to January 1st, before starting 2024 with an exciting line up of articles, podcasts and more from our VoxDevLit series, which will include reviews of economic research on Foreign Direct Investment, Search and Labour Markets, Female Labour Force Participation, Politics and Public Service Delivery, Tax, Education and more!
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Francisco J. Buera and Joseph P. Kaboski joined us to discuss how researchers are starting to combine the "micro" causal inference toolkit with "macro" modelling techniques to improve the relevance of research in low- and middle-income countries for policymakers. They outline how collaboration between these often divided fields is intensifying, why this so important, and how researchers can continue this positive trend. It's exactly this approach which is undertaken by many studies in our new VoxDevLit. Given that transport infrastructure is both strategically placed and has spillover effects on nearby regions and the economy as a whole, researchers use a mixture of micro and macro techniques to establish causal effects and model how these might impact society overall.
This VoxDevLit covers railways and roads between cities, and also transport within cities, which is the focus of Wednesday's article. Providing effective urban transportation is central to functioning and productive cities and remains one of the key policy challenges in large cities in low- and middle-income countries today. The stakes for whether cities design effective public transport networks are high, as these systems are costly and take significant time and political capital to build. Over the past decade, TransJakarta, the bus system serving greater Jakarta, Indonesia, undertook a major expansion of its network. In particular, it tripled its routes and doubled the number of buses in operation between January 2016 and February 2020. Arya Gaduh, Tilman Graff, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler and Benjamin Olken examines this expansion of Jakarta’s bus system and show how simple improvements in public transport service quality can boost usage.
Thirty years ago, Amartya Sen called attention to the 37 million “missing women” in India. They were part of the more than 100 million girls and women worldwide who would have been alive but for gender discrimination. In Monday's article, Seema Jayachandran provides an overview of son preference in India where gender gaps in child health have narrowed overall, but important gaps remain for girls and younger brothers. In the face of these persistent problems, Seema explains why the typical policy levers we might assume would make a positive difference, namely empowering women and offering financial incentives to have daughters, are not easy solutions in India.
To end the week on a more positive note, we have featured research that highlights two policy successes in Colombia. In yesterday's article, Santiago Tobón shows that a prison construction programme in Colombia aimed at improving prison conditions reduced recidivism of released offenders and was a net benefit to society. After examining the impact of new prisons, this article explores the effect of being assigned to better conditions on recidivism across all studies. Along virtually all analyses, assigning inmates to improved conditions of any form reduces the risk of recidivism.
While higher education is often viewed as a pathway out of poverty, there is scant evidence that colleges, particularly those in the top tier, serve as engines of upward mobility. In today's article, Fabio Sánchez, Juliana Londoño-Vélez, Catherine Rodríguez and Luis Esteban Álvarez-Arango assess the long-term impacts of an ambitious financial aid reform that overhauled access to Colombia’s top universities, documenting its effects on wide range of outcomes. Using comprehensive administrative data, they show that this large-scale financial aid policy boosted social mobility for low-income, high-achieving students and improved the equity and efficiency of higher education in Colombia.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's content featuring research on the historic impacts of Colombia's coffee economy, governance after oil discoveries, empowering women in Tunisia, sea level rise, and the economic impact of climate change.
Oliver Hanney, Managing Editor