This week on VoxDev: 18/10/2024
This week we featured research on climate change feedback loops, corruption in India, food economics, productivity in the workplace and agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.
Earlier this week, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were announced as the 2024 economic sciences laureates. We wrote a blog post on how they have contributed to development economics. Their work on institutions has paved the way for applied work on a number of topics that both deepen our understanding of economic development and offer critical insights for policymakers in low- and middle-income countries.
We’ve had another week of really interesting articles, with a significant focus on agriculture. In Tuesday's article, Chris Barrett, Jennifer Burney, Teevrat Garg, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea and Trinh Pham, explored the implications of the feedback loops between agriculture and climate change.
Source: Yang et al. (2024)
In today's article, Philip Wollburg, Thomas Bentze, Yuchen Lu, Chris Udry and Douglas Gollin outline new evidence on the stagnation of smallholder agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa over recent decades. On this theme, Chris Udry, the senior editor of our VoxDevLit on Agricultural Technology in Africa, led the latest webinar for the World Bank's Chief Economists of Government Network. He addressed the ways to boost technology usage to improve agricultural productivity levels in Africa and the webinar is available to watch online.
On VoxDevTalks, Tim Phillips interviewed William Masters and Amelia Finaret about food economics and its potential to resolve some of the key challenges in low- and middle-income countries.
For other topics in development economics, on Monday, Ajay Shenoy and Laura Zimmermann contributed to the Institutions & Political Economy section of our website. They outlined how a political party was able to circumvent the checks and balances embedded in India's make-work scheme and use welfare funds for the political gain of the party organisation.
Low productivity in firms in low- and middle-income countries is a significant constraint in many countries’ development journeys. What are some important workplace hazards that might be affecting worker productivity? In Thursday's article, Joshua Dean, explored the productivity consequences of noisy workplaces using two experiments in Nairobi, Kenya.
Elsewhere in development economics:
The IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings are taking place next week. Open events can be followed on IMF and World Bank Digital Platforms.
Read Berk Özler's World Bank blog post on the findings from new research on the general equilibrium effects of cash transfers and how they might be debunking the old status quo. You can also listen to an earlier VoxDevTalks episode with Dennis Egger where he discusses some of this work.
If you haven't already seen the brilliant Markus Academy videos, make sure to check out their lectures on topics in economics.
Finally, an exciting new job opportunity at Open Philanthropy, who are launching a search for a Program Officer to lead their new Economic Growth in LMICs program.
We will be back on Monday with a full week of content on social media and electoral accountability, experiments about institutions, and more!