This week we featured research on building roads, managing hospitals, forecasting weather and more!
In this week’s episode of our new Ideas in Development series on cities, Oliver Hanney is joined by Kurtis Lockhart, founder and executive director of the Africa Urban Lab, to set the scene. We discuss why everyone who cares about development should be thinking about Africa’s urbanisation, what’s currently going wrong, and where policy changes should happen.
Can colonial rule still shape development outcomes seven decades after independence? In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Lakshmi Iyer discusses her research – co-authored with Coleson Weir – tracing how two key features of British rule in India, direct versus indirect colonial administration and contrasting land tenure systems, have shaped access to schools, health centres, roads, and agricultural productivity in the post-colonial period, and asking whether targeted policy can undo what empire left behind.
Anusha Chari, Peter Blair Henry, Yanru Lee, and Pablo Picardo provide estimates of the social rates of return on investment in road infrastructure in emerging market and developing economies, which highlights the substantial unrealised gains from redirecting advanced-economy savings towards public investment in developing countries.
Maíra Coube, Luiz Felipe Fontes, and Rudi Rocha investigate Brazil’s Organizações Sociais de Saúde (OSS) model, which transferred the management of public hospitals to private non-profit organisations, while retaining public ownership of assets and governmental control over surplus rights. Following the transition to OSS management, hospital admissions increased by almost 40% relative to the baseline period. Hospitals also became substantially more efficient. These productivity gains are comparable in magnitude to those documented in studies of competition-enhancing policies and management interventions.
New evidence from Andean Peru highlights the role of the economic history that ethnic groups carry with them before being brought together. Miriam Artiles uses a natural experiment from sixteenth-century colonial Peru to show that prior exposure to economic exchange mitigates the costs of ethnic diversity on economic development in the long run.
Manuel Linsenmeier and Jeffrey Shrader focus on a fundamental constraint to better services in low-income countries: the accuracy of the global weather predictions those services rely on. They find that weather forecasts in low-income countries are about 20 years behind those in high-income countries, worsening economic losses and increasing vulnerability to climate-related risks.
Low prices paid to suppliers in global supply chains can raise concerns about unequal sharing of gains from exporting. Russell Morton outlines research on India’s garment sector, showing how these low prices can reflect both mutually beneficial agreements and surplus capture from exporters’ bargaining leverage – knowing the relative contribution of each is essential for effective policy design.
Formal military cooperation between neighbouring states can reduce jihadist violence in border regions, as shown by causal evidence from the G5 Sahel Joint Force, which allowed armies to conduct joint operations and share intelligence across borders. However, high levels of civilian victimisation put these gains into perspective. Military cooperation alone cannot resolve deep-rooted conflicts; any benefits are contingent on institutional stability – a lesson made urgent by the subsequent collapse of the G5 framework following coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Marion Richard and Oliver Vanden Eynde discuss.
Two brilliant opportunities:
- The Economic Policy Network is hiring for a Programme Manager, an amazing chance to join Stefan Dercon, Pascal Mensah and the team.
- And applications for the CSAE Visiting Fellowships 2027 are now open.
From the Center for Global Development:
- Cutting Through the Noise: Reimagining Tech for Good - Han Sheng Chia
- Will the Iran War Be the Breaking Point for Vulnerable Countries? Mary Svenstrup, Nico Martinez and Clemence Landers
- The “Triple Threat” Facing Think Tanks Helen Dempster and Catarina Afonso dos Santos
And elsewhere:
- On the AUL’s new podcast, Joe Studwell discusses How Africa Works.
- 100 Economics Papers to Inspire Wonder by Nicholas Decker.