Climate change causes conflict: How policy can respond

Conflict is tragically common, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This column reviews the rapidly growing literature linking changes in climate to various types of human conflict and finds that climate change is projected to cause an increase in numerous forms of violent human behaviour. Policies like a robust social safety net and political inclusion …

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Climate change causes conflict: How can policy respond?

Environmental stresses like droughts and temperature increases can exacerbate resource scarcity, leading to tensions and violence, particularly in vulnerable regions. While migration can alleviate pressures in affected areas, it may also introduce challenges in destination regions. Policies like a robust social safety net and political inclusion can help ensure a more peaceful future.

How human capital reshapes religious affiliation

Religion significantly influences people’s lives, both socially and economically. Researchers have long debated whether economic growth and education lead to less religious belief and participation. Yet, in many areas, strong religious beliefs persist despite economic advancements. In a recent study we delve into how economic and educational improvements in Kenya are reshaping religious affiliations, particularly the shift …

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Deworming improves lives across generations

Data tracking children in Kenya since they received deworming treatment over twenty years ago reveals that the benefits of deworming extend into the next generation

How Do Multilateral Agencies’ Contracting Structures Affect the Quality, Timeliness, and Cost of Large-Scale Infrastructure Projects?

Over the past two decades, the world has made tremendous progress towards the UnitedNations’ sustainable development goal (SDG) number seven, namely, access to affordable and clean energy. Multilaterals such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank spend billions of dollars each year in efforts to achieve SDG-7’s goal of universal access, which has …

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How contracting structures affect project outcomes in public procurement

Each year, billions of dollars are spent on public infrastructure projects which are often plagued by over-running costs, poor quality, or time delays. This column focuses on an under-studied dimension of contract structure in public procurement, namely, whether the various components of a major project are bundled together or tendered separately. The findings suggest that …

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Power Quality in Donor-Funded Infrastructure Projects

Governments and foreign aid institutions routinely finance large infrastructure construction projects in developing and emerging markets. In 2015, for example, the Government of Kenya launched the Last Mile Connectivity Project, designed to connect all Kenyan households to electricity by 2022 using financing from the World Bank (WB) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). To complete …

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How the administration’s open government plan can be more transparent

Since the Biden-Harris administration’s release of its memo calling for a more modern regulatory review process, the U.S. government has taken important steps toward improving access to the data it produces. However, most of its policy analysis, including the estimates quantifying the billions of dollars in benefits and costs related to last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, remain largely …

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Scaling up agricultural policy interventions: Evidence from Uganda

Policy interventions aimed at increasing agricultural productivity have been central in the fight against global poverty. This column uses a new methodology combining experimental data with a quantitative model to shed light on the household-level and distributional effects of scaling up agricultural policies. The authors show how different forms of scaling up agricultural policies can …

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Scaling up agricultural policy interventions: Evidence from Uganda

A new methodology combining experimental data with a quantitative model sheds light on the household-level and distributional effects of scaling up agricultural policies.

Aprobando la transparencia y rechazando la polarización

A menos de una semana del plebiscito de salida, Chile vive momentos de alta incertidumbre y polarización política. Dado el terreno fértil para la proliferación de las “fake news”, es altamente deseable que el análisis experto contribuya a separar realidad factual de especulación, quitándole combustible a la polarización. Pero lamentablemente esto no siempre ocurre.

How to make research better, more transparent, and ethical?

Working in science and research is a continuous process of comparing, discussing, rediscovering, calculating, programming, building consensus and debating. On top of that, researchers must be prepared to repeat their experiments, rethink their approach, and sometimes revise statements and admit that an error has been made. To help further the development of evidence-based knowledge, science …

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Money or Power? Financial Infrastructure and Optimal Policy

During times of crisis, do people prefer cash or in-kind transfers, and why? To study this, we ran surveys with more than 2,000 respondents across two separate contexts: urban Kenya and urban Ghana.

Ending the pandemic in low and middle income countries

As SARS-COV2 reaches an endemic state, many high-income countries are trying to maintain low fatality rates through widespread vaccination. In contrast, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) across Africa and Asia have made uneven progress towards managing the pandemic. In this essay we summarize our Annual Review of Economics article in which we look back at …

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Credibilidad y transparencia en políticas públicas

Las elecciones en Chile, si bien únicas para el país, también revelan ciertos elementos en común con el resto del planeta. La creciente polarización, y el aumento vertiginoso de las noticias falsas, son fenómenos que dificultan el debate constructivo en Chile, y en el mundo. En este contexto, consideramos urgente identificar mecanismos que nos ayuden …

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Edward Miguel on Collecting Economic Data by Canoe and Correlating Conflict with Rainfall

Audio available via Freakonomics Radio – People I Mostly Admire Podcast He’s a pioneer of using randomized control experiments in economics — studying the long-term benefits of a $1 health intervention in Africa. Steve asks Edward, a Berkeley professor, about Africa’s long-term economic prospects, and how a parking-ticket-scandal in New York City led to a …

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Edward Miguel on the “Replication Crisis” in Economics and How to Fix It

Audio available at Technology Policy Institute. We’ve been pushing our disciplines towards open science, towards research transparency in various ways, and we felt the need, we really felt compelled to put a lot of what we were doing and learning in one place to make it accessible so that students and policymakers and seasoned researchers …

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Introducing the Social Science Reproduction Platform, a resource for teaching and improving computational reproducibility

Computational reproducibility, or the ability to reproduce results, tables, and other figures using the available data, code, and materials, through a process of reproduction, is necessary for instilling trust in science. Sharing data and code–the building blocks for reproducibility–allows researchers to build on top of each other’s work and illuminates tacit knowledge linked to the …

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Vernachlässigte Krankheiten: Die Welt darf jetzt nicht nachlassen!

Covid-19 hat uns deutlich gezeigt, wie sich Krankheiten auf jeden Aspekt unseres Lebens auswirken – und wie Infektionskrankheiten arme Menschen überproportional hart treffen können. Die Welt steht vor großen Herausforderungen durch die neuen Virusvarianten, insbesondere B.1.617.2, auch Delta genannt. Aber während wir versuchen, neue Infektionswellen zu bekämpfen und die Welt gegen Covid-19 zu impfen, laufen wir …

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Op-Ed: How foreign aid for medicine yields big economic returns

President Biden’s decision to donate 500 million COVID-19 vaccines to other countries by June 2022 is an important step toward restoring the United States’ global standing. Another, parallel foreign policy solution could perhaps do even more. It is simple, cost-effective and could improve the health and well-being of billions of people — especially children. Inexpensive treatments — …

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Money or power? Choosing COVID-19 aid in Kenya

Participants in an experiment comparing demand for cash transfers and electricity subsidies in urban Kenya, overwhelmingly prefer cash given the proliferation of mobile money via platforms like M-PESA and preference for short-term liquidity. Conversely, in rural Kenya, slightly more respondents opted for electricity token transfers given that they face saving constraints with the concern that …

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The Disastrous Neglect of Neglected Tropical Diseases

With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more of the world’s population into poverty and increasing the risk of debilitating illness, now is the time to redouble our efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases. And yet, increasing demands on government budgets seem poised to halt – and even reverse – hard-won progress. US President Joe Biden’s …

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Pre-results Review at the Journal of Development Economics: Lessons learned so far

In March 2018, the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) began piloting Pre-results Review track (also referred to as “registered reports” in other disciplines) in collaboration with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Through this track, the JDE reviewed and accepted detailed proposals for prospective empirical projects before results were available, offering …

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Agricultural productivity and rural-urban wage gaps revisited: Lessons from panel data

Rich countries are industrial, poor countries are agricultural This simple observation intrigued early scholars, and prompted the conclusion that the key to economic development is the transition of economies out of agriculture and into ‘modern’ sectors. More recently, the question of whether there is ‘too much’ labour in agriculture in poor countries has seen renewed …

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Does Solving Energy Poverty Help Solve Poverty? Not Quite

The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …

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Does Providing Electricity to the Poor Reduce Poverty? Research Suggests Not Quite

The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …

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The legacy of war on social and political behaviour

Nearly half of all nations in the world have experienced some form of external or internal armed conflict in the past half century. Many international development researchers and policymakers describe war as “development in reverse” (Collier et al. 2003), having persistent adverse effects on all factors relevant for development – physical, human, and social capital. …

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Measuring ethnic preferences: New experimental evidence

Ethnic divisions have been shown to adversely affect economic performance and political stability, especially in Africa (Easterly and Levine 1997, Cederman et al. 2007 and 2011). The underlying mechanisms that have played a particularly central role in theory, and that are at the root of conventional wisdom about why ethnicity matters, are that individuals exhibit …

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Despite $7 billion to ‘Power Africa’, why the continent is still in the dark

When President Barack Obama made his first presidential visit to Kenya over the weekend, he visited not just his ancestral home, but one of the target countries in his $7 billion signature foreign aid initiative, Power Africa. Launched in 2013, Power Africa aims to boost electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative has prioritized expanding …

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The scientific case for deworming children

The last few days have seen an outpouring of news stories relating to “worm wars”, the policy debate over whether governments should provide mass treatment for intestinal worm infections in endemic areas. This was sparked when a re-analysis of a 2004 study (which found a strong link between deworming and school attendance) was published last …

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Weather and Violence

As temperatures rise, tempers flare. Anyone who has experienced the hostility of a swelteringly hot summer day in the city can attest to that. But researchers are now quantifying the causal relationship between extreme climate and human conflict. Whether their focus is on small-scale interpersonal aggression or large-scale political instability, low-income or high-income societies, the …

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An Open Discussion on Promoting Transparency in Social Science Research

This CEGA Blog Forum builds on a seminal research meeting held at the University of California, Berkeley on December 7, 2012. The goal was to bring together a select interdisciplinary group of scholars – from biostatistics, economics, political science and psychology – with a shared interest in promoting transparency in empirical social science research. There …

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Africa Unleashed: Explaining the Secret of a Belated Boom

It is well known that the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were a disaster for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In a period when other underdeveloped regions, especially Asia, were experiencing steady economic growth, Africa as a whole saw its living standards plummet. Nearly all Africans lived under dictatorships, and millions suffered through brutal civil wars. …

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Development in Dangerous Places: Comment on Collier

In his essay (and two recent books) Paul Collier lays out a detailed vision for how foreign aid and intervention might promote economic progress in the world’s poorest regions, areas populated by what he has called the “bottom billion.” The key problem, as Collier describes it here, is that: A group of about 60 small, …

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Politics May Strain Health Care Reform

Audio available via Marketplace (18:18). Republican majorities in Congress passed the largest expansion of federal government health spending in decades with the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003, with strong support from President Bush. One has to wonder if there are more than economic ideology differences at work on either side. Even Rush Limbaugh said …

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Do Conflicts Cause Poverty, or Vice Versa?

Understanding the tangled web of cause and effect that potentially links poverty and violence is a task that has long stymied social scientists. Does war cause poverty, or vice-versa? Or perhaps other factors – such as societal hatreds or divisions – cause both economic stagnation and war. Maybe all three of these are operating at …

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How to Prevent War and Famine

With the U.S. financial system in unprecedented turmoil and the economy moving toward recession, ordinary Americans wake up to daily panic about their mortgages and mutual funds. But while we fret for our financial security, the volatility in global asset prices and commodities resulting from the U.S. financial crisis will have global reach, threatening the …

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Don’t Forget the Already Poor

Audio available via Marketplace (19:50). We’re all glued to Wall Street’s implosion and for good reason. We’re worried about falling home values and our 401k’s. The crisis will also hit the world’s poorest people in Africa, Asia and Latin America who are least able to buffer the shock. For one, in the recent Vice Presidential …

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Political Ties Boost Bottom Lines

Audio available via Marketplace (20:37). Critics of our campaign finance system fear growing corruption: are contributions too often the quid pro quo for favorable government regulation or no-bid contracts? New economics research using stock prices finds that political ties can be quite profitable for U.S. firms. The idea is simple: compare companies that cultivate ties …

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Water Technologies

In rural areas where piped-water infrastructure is too expensive or difficult to maintain, the burden of water collection falls primarily on women and young children. Though they may walk hours, the sources they have access to are often dangerously polluted. With so many people relying on the same sources to wash dishes and clothes and …

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Deciphering the Demand for Safe Drinking Water

We take water for granted when it flows from our kitchen faucet, but for millions in less developed countries, safe drinking water remains a matter of life and death. Diarrheal diseases kill around two million children every year, and contaminated water is often to blame. In rural areas where pipe infrastructure is too expensive or …

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How Economics Can Defeat Corruption

It was the odd uniformity of the suitcase’s contents that tipped off the baggage inspector: six thick, identical rectangles. They could have been books, but then again, they could have been six bundles of cocaine. And in August 2007, security was tight at the airport in Buenos Aires; the country was in the midst of …

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Africa Benefits from Commodity Costs

Audio available via Marketplace (11:26). While high consumer prices for fuel and food capture the headlines, the costs of the basic raw materials for construction and industry — from copper wiring to rolled steel and timber — are also at record highs. This squeezes U.S. firms. But not everyone around the world suffers from high …

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Using Foreign Aid to Stop Conflict

Audio available via Marketplace (19:14). Food prices in the U.S. have been rising fast. Growing demand for food products in Asia and unusual global climate patterns are driving the increase. While higher prices put a moderate dent in our wallets, food shortages have much more severe consequences in Africa, the poorest part of the world. …

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Is it Africa’s Turn?

Things were certainly looking up when I last visited Busia, a small city in Kenya, in mid-2007. Busia, home to about 60,000 residents, spans Kenya’s western border with Uganda: half the town sits on the Kenyan side and half in Uganda. As befits a border town, Busia is well endowed with gas stations, seedy bars, …

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Corruption and Culture

Canada is not a corrupt country. Nigeria is. What is it that keeps us from slipping a 50 to a policeman who pulls us over for speeding, whereas such transactions are the norm on the roads of Lagos? That is, why do Nigerians bribe with impunity, while we in Canada have a collective reputation as …

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Bombing Vietnam: The Long-Term Economic Consequences

The 20th century was witness to the most destructive wars in all history. Technological progress in weaponry as well as innovation in their manufacture made it possible to destroy lives and property on an unprecedented scale. What is less clear, though, is whether the unrivaled destructiveness of modern warfare has had enduring consequences on economic …

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Stop Conflict Before It Starts

Dozens of countries have suffered through civil conflicts in the past few decades. The humanitarian consequences have been staggering: 3 million civilian deaths in Congo and hundreds of thousands more in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. The direct human impacts for survivors are enormous, and there may be lasting economic setbacks for whole societies. Likewise, …

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Incentives to Learn: Merit Scholarships That Pay Kids to Do Well

Proposals for education reform generally focus on teachers and curricula. But the most important factor in education may be the student himself or herself. A growing number of states, including Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts, have established programs that provide financial rewards in the form of merit scholarships for college for students who perform …

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Cash Talks

A generation of reforms–including more school resources and new curricula–has failed to improve urban schools. In Oakland, Calif., near where I live, 20% of high school students drop out. Only a third meet the minimum requirements for entrance to the California state university system. The dropout problem is especially severe among African-American and Latino high …

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