This week at VoxDev we covered research on parenting interventions, technological diffusion, modern slavery, AI and entrepreneurship, local government, and the political payoffs to building infrastructure.
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Before getting into this week's articles and podcast, some quick updates. We are super excited to release our VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation on Wednesday February 28th. Senior Editor Rachel Heath will join us that day at 16:00GMT to outline the key takeaways for policymakers from research on women's labour force participation in the developing world. Register to join this free webinar here. STEG announced their free online course for PhD students and economics faculty which will provide a comprehensive overview of the various types of data being used in the field of macro development. More details and sign up links here. Finally, for those in FCDO, if you signed up using a DFID address, please re-subscribe with your FCDO email address here to continue receiving this newsletter.
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Rem Koning discussed the potential of AI to promote development in low- and middle-income countries, and outlines evidence on how generative AI might help entrepreneurs become more successful. Rem talks through the process of setting up a generative AI experiment, which questions the AI mentor was asked by Kenyan entrepreneurs, and which businesses profited from its AI-driven advice.
Our two latest articles look at government policy in India. In yesterday's article, Veda Narasimhan and Jeff Weaver show that the creation of smaller local government polities resulted in greater public good access across multiple dimensions – village-level infrastructure, individually-targeted benefit programmes, and workfare programmes – over both the short and long run. In today's article, Camille Boudot-Reddy and Andre Butler outline evidence on road construction in India which shows that there are clear political gains from investing in large scale public infrastructure projects. The price of a vote however is substantial and may be overshadowed by more cost-effective short-term vote buying policies.
In Wednesday's article, Daniel Araujo, Yuri Barreto, Danny Castro and Robson Tigre revisit the mahogany market bans in Brazil to estimate the causal impact of market illegality on the prevalence of modern slavery. Their evidence from the Brazilian Amazon shows that the mahogany market's shift from legal to illegal has increased modern slavery and highlights the need for strong goverment monitoring.
Also in Brazil, on Tuesday Guilherme DePaula explored the causes of the Brazilian soybean boom. His article shows that bundling technology and services enabled the soybean boom in the Brazilian savanna, and explores who benefitted most from the policy - migrant farmers in low-quality land gained the most from bundled contracting.
Can at-scale parenting interventions effectively reduce violence towards children? Sofia Amaral, Lelys Dinarte, Patricio Dominguez and Santiago M. Perez-Vincent explore this question by evaluating a free intervention in El Salvador aimed at addressing stress-management and parenting for caregivers, which was delivered through SMS. They find that while this intervention lowered women’s use of violence towards children, it worsened male caregiver’s mental health and lowered their interactions with children.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's articles and podcast, featuring research on food inflation and child nutrition, terrorism in Kenya, smallholder agriculture, air pollution, and ultra-poor graduation programmes.