· On the CGD blog, Helen Dempster, Marcel Ricou and John Mountford make the case for linking technical and vocational education and training (TVET) with labor mobility. They argue that doing so can increase the quality of these programs, increase their attractiveness to students, and increase the impact of donor spending on TVET. “In many ways, this approach is the reverse of the current model: instead of providing training as part of mobility-focused projects (e.g., Skills Mobility Partnerships), provide mobility opportunities as part of training-focused projects. It enables donors to distribute aid in a way which supports the economic development of the trainees themselves and their families; employers globally; and TVET providers in countries of origin—a true triple win. To do this, we will need to move away from the “development-in-place” paradigm, recognizing that labor mobility is one of the best economic development tools we have, including to improve the impact of TVET investments.”
· Where does remote work sit now? Nice video chat between Neale Mahoney and Nick Bloom on the impacts now (really focused on developed countries though, although with some discussion of how anything which is fully remote is most at risk of either being outsourced to a developing country or else being replaced by AI).
· On the All About Finance blog, Salman Alibhai, Miriam Bruhn, Caio Piza and Claudia Ruiz discuss new evidence from Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia and Kosovo on whether government efforts to get banks to lend more to small firms work. The results “point to a common challenge: although government-backed credit programs have some additionality, they often struggle to reach the most credit-constrained businesses. Banks naturally prefer lending to firms with existing credit histories, larger operations, or the ability to cross-subsidize other banking products.”
· On VoxDev, Rocco Macchiavello and co-authors summarize their work on the conditions needed for coffee farmers to benefit from producing higher quality coffee. “We find that margins are higher for higher-quality coffee: international buyers pay a premium to exporters for Extra and Supremo grades, but exporters do not pay farmers higher prices for higher-quality parchment coffee,…. In other words, the price premium for higher-quality coffee is not passed through to farmers. Under these conditions, farmers have little incentive to incur the additional costs required to consistently produce Supremo-grade beans.”. Then using a DiD of a sustainable quality program where a large international buyer required exporters pay a premium to farmers, they find farmers increase the supply of Supremo-grade green coffee “From a policy perspective, this suggests that interventions should focus on helping exporters initiate, develop, and sustain long-term relationships with large international buyers that have strong and stable demand for high-quality coffee.”
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