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Blog post
IGC Quick Clicks: The unintended consequences of policies
Have you ever made a decision and felt it was rational and well thought through only to later realise it resulted in something you had never imagined? Now, think about how this would apply to national policies. The possible indirect impacts are innumerable and sometimes unforeseeable. This post looks at the unintended consequences public policies and interventions have had...
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Data for decision-making: How spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story
Ahead of the 17th Urban Age Conference and the first to be held in Africa, Sebastian Kriticos and Astrid Haas discuss the need for better data to tackle some of Africa’s biggest urbanisation challenges. On a daily basis, city policymakers need to take decisions: where and how to deliver services, what rates to apply to taxes and where to make investments, amongst others....
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Blog post
Choices, choices: Should IDOs give their employees more autonomy, or simply choose them better?
Dan Honig argues International Development Organisations (IDOs) should give their employees more autonomy in decision-making, particularly in unpredictable situations with hard-to-measure project aims. Crucially, this presumes motivated agents. The answer to this: better hiring. Dan Honig recently published the book Navigation by Judgment - Why and When Top Down Management...
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Blog post
Making room for Africa’s urban billion
By 2050, more than a billion people will be living in African cities and towns. As more and more of the continent’s population – 60% of whom live in the countryside – move to urban areas, pressures on land can only intensify. How should we make room for this massive urban expansion? How will city structures have to change to accommodate Africa’s urban billion? And...
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Blog post
Land reform, redistribution, and risk: Towards an inclusive South Africa
At the end of February 2018, a motion was put forward by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a far-left opposition party, to revisit South Africa’s Constitution and amend it to allow for land expropriation without compensation. This motion was successfully passed, and subsequent public hearings across the country confirmed that there was resounding support from the...
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Blog post
IGC Quick Clicks: How will technology impact the future of work?
Did you know that once upon a time in the UK there was a designated person, often a night watchman or ‘knock upper’, to wake people up every morning? Then came alarms and two centuries later, mobile phones – with them the job of ‘knock upper’ died. These and many other ‘machines’ have slowly made previously staple jobs redundant. Technology has been changing...
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Blog post
Is GDP an adequate measure of development?
An increasing GDP is often seen as a measure of welfare and economic success. However, it fails to account for the multi-dimensional nature of development or the inherent short-comings of capitalism, which tends to concentrate income and, thus, power. In this blog post, André Castro and Manish Prasad, make a case for using alternate measures of development such as the...
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Blog post
From roads to regulation: Realistic transport reform in Greater Kampala
Across developing cities, transportation is struggling to keep up with rapid population growth. Transport systems that are supposed to connect individuals to jobs, services, and markets have limited reach and low capacity. Land allocated to roads in sub-Saharan African cities, for example, is around a third of that in cities in other parts of the world (Collier and Venables...
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Blog post
Who are William Nordhaus and Paul Romer? And why did they win the Nobel prize in economics?
The latest on the Nobel prize in economics. The basics: Who are they? William Nordhaus of Yale University is a pioneer in the economics of climate change. He won for his work on integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic models. Paul Romer of NYU Stern won for his work on the endogenous growth model and his emphasis on the integration of technological...
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Blog post
World’s first development impact bond
About three years ago, an experiment in the financing and delivery of a programme aimed at increasing girls’ school enrollment and achievement began in Rajasthan, India. In this rural area, where agriculture is the main form of subsistence, one in 10 girls aged 11-14 are kept out of school, for reasons such as contributing to the family income or caring for siblings. A...
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What do we (not) know about the benefits of households’ electrification?
Household electrification has recently become a controversial topic. When The Economist declared that “electricity does not change poor lives as much as was thought,” a number of non-profits and industry representatives wrote indignant responses (CEO of SolarAid, CrossBoundary) arguing that electricity, including distributed solar power, can be a game-changer for rural...