Policy
2024
April 24.- Ideas for India: Aiding the search for good jobs: Evidence from Uganda
To design policies that lead young labour-market entrants to good jobs, it is important to understand job search processes and what affects the ability to find gainful employment. Based on an experiment in Uganda involving two interventions – vocational training and matching workers with firms – this article shows that while training enhances optimism about employment prospects, matching causes discouragement and poorer labour market outcomes in the long run. Link
2023
September 27.- VoxDev Talks Podcast: Environmental economics and policy in low- and middle-income countries
Low-income populations face larger climate impacts but in these settings both the private ability to adapt, and the public response, is smaller. This is the first of a series of VoxDevTalk's episodes which focus on policy-relevant results from research in environmental economics. In this episode, Robin Burgess and Kelsey Jack set the stage for this series by outlining broad takeaways from research in this area, the specific challenges faced by low- and middle-income countries with regards to climate change, and what questions remain unanswered. Link
SEPTEMBER 13.- LSE Environment Week Public Lecture - From adversity to resilience: climate justice in developing countries
Join us for this event that will address the critical issue of advancing climate justice and building resilience to climate change, focusing on the unique struggles of developing countries that are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Link
September 7.- IGC White Paper: Innovation, Growth and the Environment
Economic development, environmental protection, and innovation: IGC’s White paper on Sustainable Growth explores a path for growth in developing countries that protects the health of the planet and its citizens. Link
August 1.- JPAL Evaluations: Welfare Benefits of Decentralized Solar Energy for the Rural Poor in India
Electricity is considered critical to encouraging economic growth and reducing poverty. As the price of decentralized solar energy has continued to decline, it has excited widespread interest as an affordable and environmental alternative to centralized grid electrification efforts. To evaluate the demand for solar electricity, and the welfare impacts of access to high quality lighting, solar microgrid connections are being offered at different prices to households in rural areas of Bihar, India. Link
March 24.- IGC Policy Brief: COVID-19 and Ugandan SMEs- Impacts and speed of recovery
This policy brief outlines the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on small and medium enterprises in Uganda. Link
February 1.- JPAL Evaluations: The Role of Social Connections in the Delivery of Extension Services and Technology Adoption in Uganda
Organizations seeking to promote agricultural technologies often do so through extension agents, who are recruited from local communities to provide farmers with information about agricultural practices. Because extension systems often have limited resources and capacity, they tend to rely on social connections to further diffuse information about new technologies. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test both the impact of BRAC’s extension program on economic outcomes and the role of social incentives in shaping the delivery of the program to farmers. While they found that overall, farmers in villages that received the program had higher agricultural profits, the number and type of farmers who were targeted depended on the political alignment between the selected and non-selected delivery agents. Link
2022
December 1.- UNIDO IAP Article: Tackling youth unemployment and building economic resilience through skills training
Comparing the impact of demand‐ and supply‐side policies on youth labour mobility. Link
September 22.- IGC Growth Brief: Sustainable growth for a changing climate
Climate change is the most pressing problem facing the world today. While developing countries are disproportionately affected by it, leveraging new and affordable innovations can usher them onto a greener growth path. Embedding a climate management mindset in governance and increasing job opportunities, particularly in services, are key to sustainable growth. Link
SEPTEMBER 20.- LSE Environment Week Public Lecture - Whatever it takes: is there a 'plan B' for climate change?
Plan A for climate change should be to change our growth model to reduce emissions sufficiently to stop global warming through a mixture of carbon pricing, regulation, and technology subsidies.
Should we also consider a Plan B of encouraging new technological solutions? And if so, what kind of solutions are there and how would we act upon them? This event brings together some new thinking on this issue. Link
SEPTEMBER 16.- VoxEU Column: Why people stay poor
Though the reasons poverty persists are complex, much of the literature on this question can be sorted into two broad categories. One emphasises differences in fundamentals – ability, talent, motivation – while the other emphasises differences in opportunities that stem from access to wealth, or the so-called ‘poverty trap’. This column tests the relative merits of these views using an 11-year panel of 6,000 extremely poor households in rural Bangladesh. The resulting data support the poverty trap view, and suggest that large asset transfers create better job opportunities for the very poor. Link
MAY 10.- PhysOrg Article: Study shows the poor simply lack opportunities to gain wealth, but a one-time boost can make a major difference Link
April 18.- JPAL Evaluations: Improving Women’s Labor and Welfare Outcomes through Microfinance in Uganda
The majority of the world’s workers earning under US$1.90 a day live in rural areas and work in subsistence agriculture. Encouraging workers to expand their labor activities beyond agriculture is crucial to developing a well-rounded economy. Researchers in rural Western Uganda tested whether a microfinance program can help women borrowers switch out of subsistence agriculture to other labor activities, such as entrepreneurship or small-scale trading. While microloans helped women switch into service-based jobs including small-scale trading, they had no impact on income, spending, savings, and overall wealth. Link
February 24.- Microeconomic Insights article- Tackling Youth Unemployment: Evidence from a Labor Market Experiment in Uganda
Youth unemployment is a significant, and growing, issue in many countries. This randomized study looks to address the limited evidence on the relative effectiveness of vocational training and apprenticeships. It finds that that the two training tracks resulted in similarly large gains in the sector-specific skills of trainees in Uganda, but that labor market gains were short-lived for apprenticeships and longer-lasting for vocational training. A key differentiating factor was that vocational training provided a certificate that workers could use to demonstrate their skills, while apprenticeships did not. Programs targeting both human capital accumulation and skills certification are therefore likely to be most promising. Link
2021
December 1.- LSE Research Impact Case Study: Improving the lives of the ultra-poor
Researchers at LSE provided robust evidence that large, one-off interventions can produce sustainable economic benefits for individuals, improving the lives of people in extreme poverty. Link
November 24.- VoxDev Talks Podcast- Looking for work: Evidence from the Ugandan labour market
While vocational training helps young job seekers find work, overconfidence in finding a job has important long-term effects on job-seeking behaviour Link
NOVEMBER 8.- VoxEU Column: Bureaucracy and development
How does bureaucracy matter for development? Over the last years, an enormous interest in this question has created a large body of research, mostly focused around evidence from field experiments and micro-level administrative data. This column reviews this recent literature and embeds it in the broader discussion on how bureaucracies contribute to economic development. The authors argue that this recent evidence matters, but also encourage future research to study bureaucracies as systems, and to analyse their systemic relations to politics, citizens, firms, and NGOs. Link
October 27.- VoxDev Talks Podcast- Risky behaviour: Evidence from fire setting in Indonesia’s forests
Firms overuse fires when risks are not internalised, but greater sanctions could significantly reduce forest fire spread Link
August 10.- EPIC India Video- Unpaid electric bills:What are the reasons and the way out?
More than a billion people worldwide lack access to reliable electricity, despite multilateral efforts across the globe that have poured resources into improving electricity access and reliability in order to spur economic growth. Research from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and partner institutes suggests that the root of the problem may lie in the fact that society too often views electricity as a right that does not need to be paid for. Link
June 8.- CEPR-VDEV Webinar: The Origins and Control of Forest Fires in the Tropics Link
MAY 14.- IGC India conference: The impact of COVID-19 on labour markets Link
The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns disrupted the lives of millions of workers through layoffs and reduction in working hours and wages. At the same time, India witnessed one of the largest exoduses of labour migrants, a large population usually employed in informal, low-paid jobs and with no or limited access to social protection measures and job security. Additionally, COVID-19 increased the vulnerability of women’s employment. This webinar discusses evidence on the short- and long-term impacts of the lockdowns on labour migrants, policy responses to mitigate labour market risk from the crisis, and coping mechanisms adopted by vulnerable groups.
May 14.- IGC Project Report: Vocational training, on-the-job training, and resilience to the COVID-19 shock
In this final report, we use data from a phone survey with young workers tracked regularly since 2012 as part of an RCT on active labour market policies (Alfonsi et al. 2020) to document how they were impacted by the COVID-19 related lockdown. We targeted 1,700 young workers and successfully traced and interviewed 74% of them. The survey was conducted between October and December 2020 to contribute evidence toward understanding how the pandemic affected young worker’s economic and social lives in the short run. With this purpose in mind, we collected data on labour market and relevant socio-economic outcomes, before, during and after the two months long total lockdown put in place by the Ugandan Government. Link
January 18.- LSE Research for the World Article: Why do people stay poor?
Academics and policymakers have long debated why poverty persists. New research has revealed evidence that people living in poverty in rural Bangladesh remain poor not because they lack talent, motivation or ability, but rather because they are stuck in a low-opportunity poverty trap. Katie Parry explains more. Link
Before
MARCH 2020.- IGC Project Report: Electricity is not an entitlement: How social norms constrain access to electricity
Many developing countries suffer from low electricity access and frequent outages that restrict economic growth. These conditions arise from two primary factors: the norm that electricity is an entitlement guaranteed by the government and the technological constraint that non-payers cannot easily be excluded from electricity access. To fix this problem, energy distributors should consider reforming subsidies, incentivising bill payment, and using technology to facilitate excludability. Link
MAY 2018.- VoxDev Video: Tackling youth unemployment Link
December 2015.- IGC Growth Brief: Transforming the economic lives of the ultra-poor
A livelihood programme providing productive assets and skills training to the poorest women in Bangladesh village economies helps them move into more stable self-employment and achieves significant reductions in poverty. Link
December 2015.- LSE Blog: Tackling extreme poverty- In conversation with Robin Burgess
Who are the ultra-poor and how can development policy address their particular needs? In this blog, Professor Robin Burgess discusses the results of a research project with the Bangladesh-based development NGO BRAC. Link
SEPTEMBER 2015.- Royal Statistical Society Lecture: Randomising policy interventions in developing countries Link
MAY 2014.- IGC Bangladesh Launch Event Link
April 2014.- South Asia Growth Conference Link
December 2012.- IGC Policy Brief: Basic Entrepreneurship- A Big New Idea in Development
Evaluation of the Ultra Poor Programme in Bangaldesh found that the very poor can be transformed from laborer into entrepreneur by providing them with assets and training to run a small business, and that this occupational transformation has striking implications for their welfare. Link