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Project
Improving teaching and learning: Experiments on teacher incentives and training in Uganda
In low-income countries, primary school students often fall far below grade level and primary dropout rates remain high. Further, in some countries, educators encourage their weaker students to dropout before reaching the end of primary school. These educators hope to avoid the negative attention that authorities direct to a school when its students perform poorly on the...
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Project
Case studies: Private enterprises in fragile situations
This IGC country case study series explores the relationship between the private sector, state fragility, and conflict in fragile environments. The case studies analyse how fragility and conflict shape economic activity and private sector development, and vice versa, in these countries. They also draw lessons from these countries' experiences and discuss the outlook for...
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Project
Women’s political empowerment in Ghana
This study encouraged women’s participation in grassroots politics in Ghana and then study the effects of greater women’s participation on local political and economic outcomes. The randomised field experiment with a civic education intervention was conducted in partnership with Ghana’s National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE). The study found common...
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Project
Unemployment, self-employment, and labour market functioning in Ethiopia
Two aspects of developing country labour markets receiving a lot of attention, in particular in Ethiopia, are unemployment and small-scale or "necessity" entrepreneurship. In urban Ethiopia for instance, youth unemployment rates lie around 15%, and the self-employment rate reaches almost 40% (2011 Urban Employment Unemployment Survey). While this indicates a clear need for...
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Project
Remote sensing for measuring housing supply in Kigali
This project tests the ability of remote sensing to cost-effectively monitor and measure housing supply in data-poor cities, and demonstrates the usefulness and limitations of the resulting data for i) analyses of housing market and density trends, and ii) computerised mass land valuations. This project thus supports two core components of the IGC's Rwandan (and...
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Project
Firm-level technology adoption and investment in training
In developing countries, firms produce using technologies farther away from the frontier, and workers have lower education and formal training. It has long been argued that skills and technology are complementary (see, for example, Foster and Rosenzweig 1996). As a result, the lower skill endowment of workers may reduce the incentives of firms to invest in technology, and...
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Project
State support for the agricultural sector in the EAC
As the members of the East African Community (EAC) negotiate the harmonisation of their domestic and border tax policies, agriculture and food security remain among the prioritised key areas of cooperation. Given the vital role of the agricultural sector and the importance of improving food security in EAC countries, policymakers face strong political incentives to consider...
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Project
Monitoring emerging small towns in Tanzania: A ‘proof of concept’
Tanzania’s President’s Office Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG) worries that many Emerging Small Towns (ESTs) in the country are still officially recognised as rural locations. Estimates indicate that there may be as many as 800 ESTs. PO-RALG has identified the lack of accurate and timely information on ESTs as a major obstacle to sound policy...
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Project
Demand-driven, private sector enforcement of labour law in Bangladesh
Global supply chains often extend into weak states with limited social and environmental regulations and with little formal enforcement of existing regulations. Integration into global supply chains provides benefits to firms and workers in these countries (Tanaka, 2016; Atkin et al., 2016). But lack of regulation and lack of enforcement of existing regulation also carry...
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Project
Job portals and labour market frictions
The constraints to the growth of medium-sized firms is a question of great policy relevance given their large role in the economies of developing countries. Academic research holds that the dearth of adequately skilled workers is an important factor limiting firm growth (IGC 2014). More recent empirical work (Hardy and McCasland, 2015) suggests that labour market frictions...
Project
The social and economic impacts of electrification: Evidence from Kenya
In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 600 million people live without electricity. This study analyses the economics of rural electrification through a randomised field experiment that connected hundreds of rural households to the national electrical grid in Kenya. The experiment reveals low demand for grid connections, high costs of construction, and limited economic...