· Planet Money has an episode on the Middle Income trap and the successes and challenges of Brazil’s Zona Franca in Manaus
· This new philanthropic effort “The Africa Jobs Fund” looks interesting – it aims to support companies/organizations that get workers into export manufacturing, and international labor mobility.
· Maria Jones and Ankriti Singh summarize the recent Measuring Development conference and how to think about issues like research transparency and reproducibility in the AI era.
· On the CGD blog, Alvaro González, Markus Goldstein, and Helen Dempster discuss how the issues around the lack of good jobs in developing countries predate AI and reflect structural failures.
· On the Data blog, The 2026 Atlas of Global Development “After decades of meaningful gains, global progress today has reached its slowest pace in three quarters of a century. But the global average only tells part of the story. Embedded within it are countries that have defied the trend and accelerated far ahead. … In Türkiye, women's labor force participation rose 8 percentage points in a single decade — from 34 percent in 2015 to nearly 42 percent in 2024”
· On VoxDev, Hadia Majid on why female labor force participation is so low in Pakistan “They are trapped in low-productivity agriculture and the informal sector by social norms that impose heavy domestic burdens and stigmatise working outside the home. Effective policy must go beyond skills training and care provision to directly target these normative barriers.”
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