VoxDev Development Economics

The idea that worker utility is affected by co-worker wages has potentially broad labour market implications. In a month-long experiment with Indian manufacturing workers, in her work with Emily Breza and Yogita Shamdasani (Breza et al. 2017) Supreet Kaur establishes the effects of pay inequality on co-workers within production units. They find that pay inequality reduces output, as well as attendance by 10%. Pay disparity also lowers co-workers' ability to cooperate. However, when workers can clearly observe productivity differences, pay inequality has no discernible effect on output, attendance, or group cohesion.

Chris Woodruff discusses the role management practices play in firm growth. Further, he explores different mechanisms for improving firm management in varying contexts across developing countries.

This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that first appeared on the IGC's website.

David Atkin explains why he thinks that globalisation has brought huge benefit to developing countries in terms of expanding their manufacturing sectors and introducing them to new technologies. Retreat from globalisation can have some skill-gain benefit, as young people may stay in education longer if there are fewer low-paid manufacturing jobs on offer to them, but this is a long-term gain and in the short-term the net effect is likely to be detrimental to developing countries. Atkin asks how countries can mitigate the effects and take opportunities to broaden the skills base of their workers.

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Drawing on lessons from Colombia and India, Orazio Attanasio of UCL discusses the roles, pre-existing welfare programmes' infrastructure, and parental behaviour play in effective delivery of early childhood development interventions.

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Male-owned firms earn nearly twice as much profit as female-owned firms. This difference is driven by a variance in the quantity of garments sold, rather than prices charged or costs incurred. Using a firm census and a market research survey, Morgan Hardy and Gisella Kagy (Hardy and Kagy 2017) uncover gender segregation in demand and a gender gap in the market size to firm ratio, suggesting a demand scarcity for female-owned firms.

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How can we increase output per worker in countries like India and China where it is particularly low? Anant Nyshadham discusses one way to do so: by improving the physical work environment. When garment manufacturing firms in India changed their lighting system to a more energy-efficient one, the ambient temperature on the factory floor reduced by 2.5oC. This decrease resulted in an improvement in the output per worker. Moreover, the gains in productivity are five times the energy cost savings the firm is getting from the efficient lighting.

The research in this VoxDev Talk was conducted thanks to funding from the PEDL programme. To know more about the project, please click here.

Building state functionality is difficult, and particularly so in fragile environments marred by weak institutions and political instability. Eliana La Ferrara discusses four methods to overcome the challenges of fragile states.

This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was previously published on the IGC's website.

Ed Glaeser explains why cities are the best pathway to prosperity and outlines three lessons from over 30 years of economics research on urbanisation.

This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was previously published on the IGC's website.

The narrative around Africa has changed over the last decade with it now being heralded as the economic powerhouse of the future. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have laid a solid foundation to their economic growth. However, the next decade will prove crucial in sustaining this growth. To do so, job creation and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are crucial. John Sutton (LSE) discusses why and how African countries should attract FDI.

This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was first published by the IGCand is based on an IGC Growth Brief.

John Van Reenen, Professor at MIT Department of Economics and Sloan School of Management, gives a brief explanation of the ways that the current backlash against globalisation emerging in Western countries is likely to affect developing countries, and what measures governments in these countries can take to protect their economies. On the flip side he points out that disruption of global value chains will also lead to damage for companies and consumers in the Western countries adopting an anti-globalisation stance.

VoxDev Talks