Supply chains, protest, job loss and more!
This week we featured research on supply chains, protest, job loss and more!
We are excited to announce the launch of our upcoming VoxDevLit on Air Pollution. On June 17th at 4pm (UK), Teevrat Garg and Anant Sudarshan will review the economic evidence on air pollution. Register for this VoxDevLit launch event here.
In this week’s episode of Ideas in Development, Michelle Rao discusses evidence use, how evaluations shape funding, and a key evidence gap in development economics.
Martin Williams, author of Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies, spent more than a decade studying civil service reform from the inside, partnering with the Office of the Head of Civil Service in Ghana and examining 131 reform efforts across six countries. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, he explains why even well-intentioned reforms so frequently fall short, and what civil service leaders can do about it.
Following Iran’s 2022 ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement, centring on the country’s mandatory hijab law which has been in place since shortly after the Islamic Revolution, the regime made no legal concessions. In this setting, Avenia Ghazarian examines whether mass protest shifted norms and behaviour even when the laws governing that behaviour remain unchanged. She finds that, in households located in counties with protest activity, women’s share of total household resources increased, while men’s share declined.
Ricardo Dahis, Ivan de las Heras, and Santiago Saavedra explore the relationship between age and government policy in one of the most consequential environmental settings on the planet: the Brazilian Amazon. They find that municipalities governed by mayors under the age of 35 experienced significantly less deforestation compared to otherwise similar municipalities. Beyond deforestation, they also find a 46% reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions per capita when a young mayor is in office.
In Somalia, Marco Alfano and Thomas Cornelissen find that conflict disrupting transport routes raises food prices and worsens household welfare in distant, peaceful markets, showing that the economic costs of violence travel far beyond the front line through supply chains. Aid strategies focused on areas with active fighting should be complemented by protection of key transport corridors and supply-chain monitoring to reach all affected communities.
A five-year randomised trial across Tanzania finds that entrepreneurship training delivered to young women before family obligations set in produces lasting income gains, but both economic and reproductive-health programmes unexpectedly increased early pregnancy – an effect attenuated when the two are combined. Lars Ivar Oppedal Berge, Kjetil Bjorvatn, Fortunata Makene, Linda Helgesson Sekei, Vincent Somville, and Bertil Tungodden discuss.
In January 2022, the US suspended Ethiopia’s eligibility for the African Growth and Opportunity Act, ending Ethiopia’s preferential trade access to the US market. This led to a major increase in tariffs, the loss of key buyers, and, at some companies, mass layoffs. Lukas Hensel, Francois Gerard, and Stefano Caria show that losing these formal jobs had lasting negative impacts, highlighting the importance of expanding job-loss support and changing its current design.
The majority of women in Pakistan do not access paid, formal work. They are trapped in low-productivity agriculture and the informal sector by social norms that impose heavy domestic burdens and stigmatise working outside the home. Effective policy must go beyond skills training and care provision to directly target these normative barriers. Hadia Majid discusses.
Elsewhere in development:
Check out this podcast by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen with Katharine Collins on inventing the second malaria vaccine.
On CGD, Álvaro S. González, Markus Goldstein and Helen Dempster write about the developing world’s job crisis.