· Forthcoming In the JEL, Jishnu Das reviews Karthik Muralidharan’s big book on improving governance in India. “this book is at its strongest—even brilliant—in making a reasoned and evidence-based argument for why India desperately needs more investment in the state and providing a concise summary on the economics research over the last two decades in a particular sector. It is weakest in in its exposition of issues around social justice and the changing citizen–state relationship in India at this particularly fraught period in its history”
· On VoxDev, Kahn, Liao and Zheng examine how Vietnam was able to achieve rapid growth from trade without suffering environmental degradation – they in fact find air quality improving – which they attribute to the investments made in renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
· Also on VoxDev, Nasgowitz and co-authors look at impacts in Uganda of subsidized access to full-day preschools on kids 3 years later. “We find that children who received the preschool subsidy have 0.13 standard deviation (SD) better anthropometric outcomes three years later relative to the control group. This is driven by a 0.15 SD increase in weight-for-age and a 0.2 SD rise in their body mass index (BMI)…. We find similar treatment effects for children in households receiving cash transfers or both interventions….Regarding children’s learning outcomes, we find positive but small and imprecisely estimated effects of the preschool subsidy or the cash transfers …. This could be due to the 83-week school closure implemented shortly after the completion of the year-long subsidy programme or a catching up of children in the control group.”
· On the World Bank’s Data Blog, Mahler, Holla and Serajuddin discuss whether the term “developing world” still carries any meaning. I particularly appreciate them bashing up on the term Global South “the “Global South” has perhaps less negative connotations but is confusing when the country with the southern-most average latitude (New Zealand) belongs to the Global North and when high-income countries, such as Chile and Uruguay, are considered to be part of the Global South.” (Not to mention low income countries in the Northern Hemisphere are considered part of the Global South also ) Their solution of “use terms such as “low- and middle-income countries” rather than “developing countries”” also strikes me as one that doesn’t work that well when it comes to word counts and using the terms frequently in a comparison.
· On Let’s Talk Development, Gaurav Nayyar discusses the promise and pitfalls of production subsidies as industrial policy, and the conditions needed for them to work better.
· Call for papers- the Barcelona Summer Forum in economics (deadline Feb 28) – the development economics days are June 18-19.
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