This week we featured research on the impacts of rising food prices, predicting terrorism, providing agricultural advice at scale, humanitarian aid and the costs of inaction, pollution exposure and climate resilience.
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The real price of food has risen dramatically in 21st century, and Monday's article presents new evidence on malnutrition risks among 1.27 million children from 44 low- and middle-income countries which quantifies the significant negative health effects caused by rising food prices. For the first time the scientific community has solid cross-country evidence that the nutritional status of young children is highly vulnerable to food price shocks, which seem increasingly frequent and severe in the 21st century. Derek Headey and Marie Ruel outline their research here.
The need for humanitarian relief is at record highs and support from the international community is not meeting demand. In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Arif Husain of the UN World Food Programme discusses the growing funding gap for aid, the urgent need to improve global food security, and the consequences if we choose not to act.
The number of global terrorist attacks is on the rise, yet evidence on financing and coordination between different terrorist organisations is limited. Tuesday's article focuses on Kenya from 2001 to 2014 and uses al-Shabaab’s revenue streams and position in the al-Qaeda network to predict both the timing and the location of terrorist attacks. Using these predictions, Marco Alfano and Joseph-Simon Görlach identify the effect of attacks on primary schooling.
Air pollution represents a huge environmental threat to human health. In yesterday's article, Susanna Berkouwer and Joshua Dean evaluate the effectiveness of improved, fuel efficient cookstoves at reducing spikes in pollution exposure, and explore whether this translates into health improvements. They find that lowering peak pollution exposure through fuel efficient cookstoves reduces respiratory symptoms. However, in areas with high average pollution, more must be done to improve clinical outcomes and reduce health expenditures.
Today's article presents evidence on the effects of a graduation model - that was relatively less complex in scope than other graduation programmes - in increasing resilience against localised droughts in rural Ethiopia. Kalle Hirvonen, Daniel Gilligan, Jessica Leight, Heleene Tambet and Victor Villa show that the intervention they study provides a buffer to households - and particularly to women - from the adverse effects of drought.
On Wednesday, Tushi Baul, Dean Karlan, Kentaro Toyama and Kathryn Vasilaky explored how to deliver effective agricultural advice at scale. Their article shows how video aids tailored to their context and shown repeatedly can improve outcomes for hard to reach female farmers in India.
In other news, STEG announced their annual lecture for 2024 with Esther Duflo - register here to join this online lecture on April 25th. There are great new development economics resources available on the AEA's website - you can find recordings and slides from Emily Breza and Supreet Kaur's course here. Ernest Aigner, Jacob Greenspon and Dani Rodrik released an important new paper - The Global Distribution of Authorship in Economics - presenting evidence which shows that "authors from developing countries remain excluded from the profession’s top-rated journals and that their research receives less attention from other economists."
Don't forget to sign up here for our launch event on Wednesday February 28th (16:00GMT) with Senior Editor Rachel Heath, who will outline the key takeaways for policymakers from research on women's labour force participation in the developing world.
Be sure to stay tuned for next week's articles, VoxDevLit and podcast, which feature a range of research on gender, focusing on AI in education, violence against women, female labour force participation, gender norms and the gender education gap.