Remittances provide a significant portion of income in developing countries, but are often not used for the purposes intended by the migrants. Isaac Mbiti (South Methodist University) and Dean Yang (University of Michigan) seek to identify ways of raising the development impact of remittance flows to Africa by granting migrants greater control over how their remittances are spent.
Ideas for growth in developing countries
The IGC promotes sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research. The IGC is directed and organised from hubs at the LSE and Oxford and comprises country offices across the developing world. The IGC was initiated and funded by UKaid from DFID.
What we're doing
Bilateral and multilateral aid donors spend considerable sums on “Community Driven Development” or “Community Driven Reconstruction”, a programming method whereby affected communities make their own decisions about how project money will be spent. James D. Fearon (Stanford University) are evaluation CDR programming through complete data collection and analysis in 42 candidate communities in Liberia.
Migration is often treated as a nuisance variable in evaluations of the effects of new infrastructure. Taryn Dinkleman and colleagues view them more seriously as outcomes of interest for development economists and policymakers
What we're reading
In the last year, Ethiopia's annual exports recently reached a never-before-seen level of $2 billion, a growth of 38 percent from the year before. Based on recent data on the composition of exports, this note reviews where this growth came from in terms of both supply-side factors (i.e., which commodities showed the largest increases) as well as demand-side contributors (what foreign markets mattered most).
Owen Barder on the need for feedback loops and experiment in development policy
China’s existing “low-carbon cities” are mostly fakes, energy researcher Jiang Kejun tells Liu Jianqiang.