Index-based insurance, information access, carbon markets and more!

Globally, women do less paid work than men, and childcare responsibilities are one important reason why. Could better access to childcare help more women enter the workforce, increase household incomes, and boost economic growth? In this week’s episode of Economics Unpacked, Lore Vandewalle and Rachel Heath explore what the evidence from Uganda, Kenya, Nicaragua, and elsewhere tells us about childcare, women’s employment, and household incomes.

In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Pauline Grosjean discusses new global research on masculinity norms and their links to violence, mental health, and authoritarian political attitudes. Drawing on a review co-authored with colleagues from economics and other social sciences, she explains how social expectations shape male behaviour across cultures, and what this means for policy.

Droughts fuel violent conflict between pastoralists and farmers across Africa. Kai Gehring and Paul Schaudt present evidence from Kenya’s index-based livestock insurance programme, which shows that satellite-triggered payouts reduce drought-induced conflict by around 25% – and prevent enough deaths to justify the programme’s subsidies on those grounds alone.

Lawrence H. Goulder, Xianling Long, Chenfei Qu, and Da Zhang study China’s tradable performance standard, showing that the country’s carbon market is projected to deliver benefits well in excess of its cost – and how smarter benchmark and auction design could make it even more effective.

Access to sought-after knowledge can make a person more central in their networks. Laura Derksen and Pedro Souza find that, in Malawian schools, students with exclusive access to online information became social hubs, as others connected to them for indirect access. Policies that target initially well-connected people may underperform, as networks change endogenously.

Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Benjamin Daniels find that in villages hit hardest by Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, a strong relationship between poverty and mental health persisted well after the disaster, while no such relationship existed in less-affected communities. They conclude that there is no one global link between poverty and mental health (in either direction), but that lived and localised population experiences, like disaster survival and recovery, may determine the existence and strength of these connections.

In Rwanda, Aimable Nsabimana, Abdou Musonera, and Daniel Overbeck examine how the paving of Rwanda’s road network affected nearby municipalities, i.e. towns or villages. Following the paving of a highway, local tax revenues of nearby municipalities increased strongly and consistently over time, and doubled within five years. They find that firms with fewer than ten employees drove all the growth, while larger formal firms, the kind that register for CIT and VAT, showed no response.

In Africa, small-scale fisheries employ around nine million people and provide substantial shares of essential micronutrients to hundreds of millions more. But artisanal fishers share coastal waters with large industrial fleets, many of them foreign. Using radar data, Aishwarya Agarwal and Gabriel Englander show that protected nearshore fishing zones can successfully keep industrial vessels out of African coastal waters, boosting fish stocks and small-scale catches without cutting industrial fishing overall.

Elsewhere in development: