This week we featured research on labour unrest, electoral turnover, parallel governance and more!
Series 2 of Economics Unpacked returned this week! In our first episode, Hanwei Huang explores more than 150 years of China's economic development – from the Opium Wars and the opening of China's ports, through central planning under Mao, the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping, WTO accession, and the country's emergence as a global manufacturing and technology leader. Examining the role of trade, industrial policy, foreign investment, and economic reform in shaping modern China, he asks an important question: can other countries replicate China's success?
Climate change is already reshaping daily life for millions of people in developing countries, from drying rivers to unpredictable harvests. Yet, as Guy Grossman explains in this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, most of what we know about the politics of climate change comes from research on wealthy nations. Grossman, together with co-authors Audrey Sacks and Alice Xu, has written a new review examining how climate change becomes political in the developing world – and why the connection between lived experience and government accountability so often fails to form.
Robert Akerlof, Anik Ashraf, Rocco Macchiavello, and Atonu Rabbani study what happened to worker productivity in a large Bangladeshi garment factory when unrest unexpectedly broke out. They find that workers who lost more friends cut their output sharply compared to those who lost few. The magnitude is sizeable: each friend lost translates into roughly two to three days of lost output per month. Because workers are paid piece rates, this is lost income for them as much as lost production for the factory.
Turnover in governmental organisations involves a fundamental trade-off. Enabling citizens to replace their leaders via democratic elections might weaken institutional memory and disrupt bureaucratic processes. However, it may also create new impetus for reform and break entrenched elite networks. In Indonesia, Samuel Bazzi, Masyhur Hilmy, Benjamin Marx, Mahvish Shaukat, and Andreas Stegmann find that new village leaders make more appointments, promotions, and demotions than re-elected incumbents. This reshaping of the village bureaucracy also reduced the prevalence of nepotistic appointments.
In Nepal, Bhishma Bhusal, Michael Callen, Rohini Pande, Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Deepak Singhania, and Apurva Subedi find that parallel governance institutions built by Maoist rebels during the civil war led to lasting improvements in political participation among historically excluded groups, more representative candidate selection across parties, and greater local government capacity.
In Malawi, elite politics sustain a maize economy riddled with corruption that traps smallholder farmers in poverty. Shifting more agricultural, social protection, and humanitarian funding towards cash-based support could disrupt this elite bargain, though doing so will require political as well as technical strategy. Edward Archibald explains.
Erik Robertson outlines evidence from colonial India which shows how economic ideas can influence civil servants and shape policy for decades, determining whether governments respond decisively to crisis or not at all.
Scattered pilots risk overshadowing more vital infrastructure investments in the adaptation layer that can unlock AI for development. Matching AI's capabilities to real-world impact requires overcoming deployment constraints. These constraints come in a range of shapes and sizes across contexts, and solving them requires bottom-up adaptation. Sharif Kazemi, Oliver Hanney, Han Sheng Chia, Sid Ravinutala, and Shahrukh Wani discuss why we need to build an 'adaptation layer': the mechanism for rapid iteration to bridge the capability-deployment gap.
Elsewhere in development:
- Esteban Quiñones, Marie Gaarder, and Thomas Kelly write about evidence, method, and what the RCT debate is missing.