· On Ideas for India, Aneesha Parvathaneni and Dean Yang summarize their work on how the impacts of World War II industrial production can still be seen in Indian structural transformation six decades later. Using a shift-share strategy they find that “Indian districts that received more orders related to World War II saw greater transformation from agriculture to industry and services more than six decades later – with the majority of this structural transformation driven by procurement in heavy industries. These districts also experienced higher consumption levels, urbanisation rates and nighttime luminosity.”
· 3ie has launched a new inventory of remote-sensing indicators for development, with this blog providing some background. “If you are interested in using geospatial data, or are interpreting geospatial data, you can navigate here, to your sector of interest, and then be presented with a list of RS indicators and which social science variables they are used as a proxy for. You can find descriptions and pros and cons for each indicator, and then can explore the paper repository to find methodological and empirical papers related to that indicator” “The largest categories were agriculture (37 papers), firms (30), education (29), social protection (24), and macroeconomics (20).”. He then provides one sentence summaries of the education papers.
· On the CGD blog, Lee Crawfurd summarizes papers from the recent CSAE conference. There were 259 papers presented. “The countries with the most studies on them were Ethiopia (24 papers), Nigeria (19), South Africa (17), Kenya (16), and Ghana (15).”.
· Esther Duflo had the economist as plumber. Susan Athey’s Presidential Address in the AER has the economist as designer. “I argue that digital technology is particularly well suited for addressing a wide range of social impact problems…A central theme in this paper is the role of the economist as a “designer.” A designer applies existing ideas and conceptual frameworks and creates new ones when carrying out activities such as identifying problems, as well as breaking problems down into forces or components so as to guide the creation of, and selection among, solutions. A designer generates ideas for solutions and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives, iteratively refining the frameworks and ideas for solutions. A designer considers the context where a solution will be deployed. This includes the range of agents, such as institutions and organizations, that will be directly affected as well as those that will be indirectly affected. This also includes the incentives faced by all agents and the new equilibria the solutions may generate. The designer may take actions to shape the context to support proposed solutions. The economist may play a design role for many distinct categories of problems. In this paper I focus on six design roles and six key cross-cutting challenges facing the economist in these roles, highlighting how economic tools and frameworks help meet the challenges”
· Call for papers: G²LM|LIC/path2dev/BREAD Conference on Development Economics to be held at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan on September 11-13. Submissions due May 15.
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