This week we featured research on urbanisation and flooding, Mexico's pre-school mandate, market access and firm growth, female labour force participation in Bangladesh, enforcement and informal employment, and a tree planting programme in the Philippines.
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We are really excited about our upcoming event outlining how students and researchers based in low- and middle-income countries can begin to use generative AI for economic research. Register here for this free online webinar on Tuesday October 22nd with Anton Korinek.
Yesterday, we released a blog post that brings together some of the key unanswered questions in development economics, highlighted by our VoxDevLits, to signpost areas where more research is needed. This week we also released the first in a series of articles reflecting on how the evidence from VoxDevLits applies to specific contexts. Nusrat Jahan outlined the evidence on Female Labour Force Participation in Bangladesh, exploring the barriers to women’s labour force participation in Bangladesh, promising evidence-based policy options, and where more evidence is required.
Spending on early childhood educational programmes and enrolment in preschool has grown across the developing world during the past two decades. However, whether such programmes have lasting impacts remains a matter of debate. On Monday, Jere Behrman, Ricardo Gomez-Carrera, Susan W. Parker, Petra Todd and Weilong Zhang discussed their research analysing the long-term effects of Mexico's preschool mandate.
Understanding why firms aren’t growing, and are often small and unproductive, is essential for solving development problems. As part of our collaboration with J-PAL covering their policy insights series, David Atkin spoke to Tim Phillips about how market access can spur firm growth, which types of market access interventions have been the most successful and where more research is needed. You can listen to VoxDevTalks wherever you get your podcasts.
As countries around the world seek solutions to both climate change and poverty, nature-based solutions, such as tree planting programmes, are gaining attention. These programmes offer the potential to not only sequester carbon, but also create jobs and transfer productive forestry assets to receiving individuals or communities, aligning environmental and development targets. Yesterday, Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci outlined the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the Philippines' large-scale tree planting programme.
In today's article, Brenda Samaniego de la Parra and León Fernández Bujanda examine how increasing enforcement changes formal and informal employment. Although increasing the cost of informal employment raises formalisation rates, greater enforcement actually leads to a large and persistent drop in firm size.
Evidence on urban expansion and flood exposure is critical for policymakers aiming to increase climate resilience in the world’s cities. On Tuesday, Jun Rentschler, Paolo Avner & Stéphane Hallegatte outlined new evidence showing that human settlements around the world have been continuously and rapidly expanding into flood zones.
Elsewhere in development economics, make sure to check out Karthik Tadepalli's article for the Asterisk magazine about why firms should be at the centre of the development challenge.
The Centre for Global Development are busy organising excellent events and writing interesting blogs:
- Charles Kenny writes about James Leigland's forthcoming book "The Rise and Fall of Public-Private Partnerships" - "It is good to know that it is becoming a consensus that billions to trillions is a fantasy."
- I really enjoyed yesterday's event on improving the impact per dollar of USAID programming - well worth catching up on the recording, which is now online.
- Finally, two upcoming events - CGDEV is hosting 'The Growth Summit: Recentering Economic Growth in Development.' and "What Can Donors Learn from the Rise and Fall of DFID?"
Finally, as the Nobel Prizes are released this week, check out Paul Novosad's thread on the upbringing of top scientists. He joins Sam Asher to discuss this research on VoxEU's podcast.
We will be back on Monday with a full week of content on climate change and agriculture, anti-poverty programmes and democracy, and more!