In Nigeria, cash transfers to women increase their desire for agency but only when husbands can't see it – revealing the complex interplay between economic empowerment and social norms.

The 1870 Education Act demonstrates how targeted public investment in education can help narrow the gap in opportunity between rich and poor children.

Inequality pushes poor households to sacrifice nutrition for ‘little luxuries’, reshaping basic needs and worsening malnutrition. The implications for poverty programmes are large.

Africa’s total public debt has risen more than fourfold since the early 2000s, but just as important as the increase in debt volumes is the shift in structure. This column uses a new open-access dataset covering more than 50,000 loans and securities issued by 54 African countries to reveal that African governments now raise more than half of their financing at home, reversing decades of dependence on external lenders. While the rise of domestic debt markets may deepen financial systems, foster local investor bases, and enhance monetary autonomy, the authors warn that the line between...

In China, granting firms the right to trade internationally boosted productivity, with gains growing over time and shared with workers through higher wages.

YouTube video by Centre for the Study of African Economies

Training women in assertive communication in India enabled them to more effectively persuade their husbands to support their participation in the workforce – leading to substantial and sustained increases in women’s job uptake and earnings at low cost.

In India, conflict boosts electoral support for incumbents only when leaders and media make it politically salient, turning soldier deaths into narratives of national strength.

Aggregate data can mask micro-level adjustments in the wake of terrorist activities. Administrative data from Pakistan reveals how a major terrorist attack distorted export patterns across firms, products, and regions.

Although machine learning models using mobile phone data can make poverty targeting faster and more cost-effective, traditional survey-based methods remain more accurate. The optimal approach therefore depends on striking the right balance between cost, accuracy, and programme scale.

Explore the playbooks behind 82 export booms in emerging economies since 1995

It is often argued that returns to R&D are low in developing countries, making imported technologies a better path to growth. Yet technologies designed for frontier nations may not fit local conditions, limiting their productivity gains. This column studies Brazil’s Embrapa, a large public R&D effort to create agricultural innovation suited to Brazil’s ecology. Embrapa shifted research toward local needs and raised agricultural productivity by 110%, far outweighing its costs. Sustained, locally targeted R&D can be a key part of development policy.

Brazil’s R&D subsidy programme spurred long-term growth by helping financially constrained companies adopt foreign technologies and expand into high-tariff markets through import substitution.

In El Salvador, extreme heat lowers agricultural productivity and rural incomes, pushing farmers – especially those with strong migrant networks – to use international migration as a climate adaptation strategy.

In Brazil, anti-corruption audits substantially reduced vote buying and citizens’ demands for private favours – demonstrating how transparency initiatives can weaken clientelism and strengthen democra...

Merit-based recruitment and higher pay in Chile’s public hospitals attracted better-trained managers – leading to lower mortality rates and improved healthcare performance.

I have been (trying) to keep track of the latest AI-related thinking and research that is relevant to low- and middle-income countries. It is hard to know where to look and what to trust, here are the...

I have been (trying) to keep track of the latest AI-related thinking and research that is relevant to low- and middle-income countries. It is hard to know where to look and what to trust, here are the...