· The awesome photographer behind our Development Impact blog images, Mariajose Silva-Vargas, has a new impact evaluation photo story up, illustrating an RCT she has been working on with the WWF in France on using school gardens to help kids understand challenges such as climate change without it all being a message of doom and gloom. A nice example showing how photos can help a lot in illustrating what an intervention looks like in practice.
· On Let’s Talk Development, Arthur Alik Lagrange and Clement Imbert summarize a new review of cash-for-work/public works programs and jobs. “The core insight from the evidence is that public works are a social protection tool, not a job creation tool. Treating them as the latter risks misallocating resources and setting programs up to fail against the wrong benchmark.”
· I recently gave a keynote talk on government support for firms for jobs at a Jobs Network conference at CMI in Bergen. They summarized my talk here: “Before implementing measures, we should start by asking the right questions, argues McKenzie. What is the main challenge: is it low productivity, a lack of customers, a mismatch between available skills and what the market needs? Or do people simply not live where the jobs are?”
· In VoxDev, Rema Hanna and co-authors summarize the results of a massive experiment in Indonesia in which more than 23 million people applied to a safety net program that provided on-demand assistance with cash and online training - with 11 million chosen in lotteries. “Only about 30% of individuals that are recorded as having received the programme in the administrative data actually self-report that they did so when asked about the programme in the national household surveys.” – they argue that this likely reflects agents who helped people apply, but who may not have received the benefits – and argue that the program did lead to an increase in self-employment and business income for a subset who were in an online survey.
· The Agency Fund has a couple of interesting blogs about the role of agency and mindset in helping move people out of poverty. Here is Richard Sedlmayr on combining cash interventions with agency interventions (for once I recommend reading the comments section, which notes that absolute magnitudes of the agency interventions can be small, they just look cost effective because they are cheap). And Yanick Kemayo of Kabakoo offers insights from his upbringing in Cameroon and discussion of whether we are now in development’s “psych wave”, with a review of some recent studies.
· Julia Rohrer on the many issues in running moderated cross-country regressions (e.g. “It has been well established that X affects Y. However, the magnitude of the effects plausibly depends on some context factor Z. In the following cross-country analysis, we show how the role of X for Y varies depending on Z. This is usually followed by, in the best case, some variation of a multilevel regression analysis that regresses Y onto X, Z, and their interaction (potentially with additional controls).”)
· Dani Rodrik on how he became a manufacturing skeptic, and the argument for “the possibility of a virtuous cycle of economic growth built on middle-class services. Expansion of the middle class shifts consumer demand toward higher-quality and more productive services, which in turn enables the rise in workers’ incomes that underpins the middle class. But the process is not automatic. It requires an important role for the government in facilitating the requisite productivity enhancements.”
· Conference call:
o The IGC/EGC Conference on Firms, Trade, and Development 2026 will be held at Yale on September 10-11, with submissions due Friday June 1. There is also a PEDL call for an early-career half-day workshop that will take place on the morning of Sept 10.
o BREAD/ITAM/CAF conference on development economics October 23-24 in Mexico City, with submissions due July 15.
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