· Antonio Mele has set up a github of AI Skills for Economists with a set of Claude code skills to use for creating presentations, doing data cleaning and basic regression analysis in Stata, R and python, helping do a literature review, and more…
· On VoxDev, Rocco Macchiavello and co-authors summarize their work on efforts to understand why Bangladeshi garment firms don’t promote more women. “women have remained trapped at the bottom: they are heavily represented among sewing-machine operators but remain scarce in even the first managerial layer – line supervisors.…. Almost the entire gender wage gap in the sector is due to women lacking access to internal promotions to supervisory roles…For policy and practice, the implication is not simply ‘train women’. It is to design low-risk organisational experiments that allow firms to learn about female supervisory talent, and to reduce the self-fulfilling effects of biased beliefs. If the constraint is managerial learning – and the organisation’s willingness to update – then carefully structured trials can move firms towards a new equilibrium.”
· Also on VoxDev, Lise Masselus and co-authors discuss the limited long-term effects of rural electrification in Rwanda. “In Rwanda, the Electricity Access Roll-Out Program (EARP) increased national electrification rates from just 6% in 2009 to over 50% by 2023…We revisit 41 rural Rwandan communities on average 8–9 years after grid connection and ask a simple question: what does electricity adoption and use look like a decade on?.... The first striking finding is that electrification does not translate into universal connection, even after so many years….Among households that do connect, electricity consumption is extremely low – and remains so even a decade later. The average connected household consumes around 8 kWh per month. To put this in perspective, this is roughly enough to power a few lightbulbs and charge mobile phones, but little else….There is little evidence of broader structural change in local economies. There are no signs of noteworthy enterprise creation, and manufacturing activities are generally rare.”
· On Let’s Talk Development, Stuti Khemani and Andu Nesrey Berha show electricity reliability is worse in countries with more corruption, even conditional on income levels. They discuss different possible channels for this, and an agenda for how to make reforms feasible in politically constrained settings.
· Michael Geruso and Dean Spears have a very interesting recent book called “After the Spike” about the consequences of falling fertility, and prospect of global depopulation. They provide a useful discussion of why takes like “wouldn’t this be great for the climate” aren’t necessarily true and argue that stabilizing population is desirable. The latest Journal of Economic Perspectives has an article by them “the likelihood of persistently low global fertility” which summarizes part of their argument: “The 115 richest countries in the world together have an average total fertility rate of 1.5 (United Nations 2024). A birth rate of 1.5 would lead to a decline of 44 percent in generation size over two generations…the global average of the total fertility rate has been falling for most of the past 75 years: from 4.85 in 1950 to 2.25 in 2023…There is no reason found in evidence to expect a certain, automatic reversal—not from the evidence in the discipline-spanning literature on long-run fertility trends and policy impacts, and not in the evidence presented in this article. To put it bluntly, history offers no examples of societies recognizing very low birth rates as a social priority and then responding with effective changes that restore, and sustain, replacement-level fertility”.
· In the meantime, Lant Pritchett argues in the JEP that this period of very different rates of population growth across countries increase the gains from migration. “With working-aged population falling in high-labor-productivity places and rising in low-productivity places, the potential gains from allowing workers to move from low-productivity, youth-bulge regions to high-productivity, labor-scarcity regions are in the trillions of dollars…. Over the next few decades, relaxing the current constraints on this movement is by far the largest known policy-based economic opportunity for improving global human well-being”. He argues for more temporary mobility as a politically palatable way of doing this.
· Esther Duflo in the Times of India in how students should rethink the most important skills they learn in university. “The entire landscape is evolving so fast that the specific skill you are teaching someone will become obsolete by the time they finish their education…the real value of higher education lies in building abilities that last…learning how to think clearly, write well, question ideas and make reasoned judgements”. She also stresses learning the basics behind tools, not just the tools themselves “Tools will change. Technologies will evolve. But students who understand the basics will always be able to adapt no matter what the next shift looks like”.
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