Development http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-dev Development 2026-07-27 The Global Electrification Frontier and Climate Change https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:814&r=&r=dev Off-grid solar promises a low-cost and carbon-free path to electrification. But will poor households choose off-grid power? We run a multi-year pricing experiment in rural India to estimate demand over all electricity sources, including off-grid solar, diesel generators, and both formal and informal connections to the grid. We find that off grid solar is an important stop-gap, but households value grid electrification five times more. The grid, however, decreases global surplus, both because household payments do not cover the cost of supply, in an environment with high informality, and because grid connections increase carbon damages. We apply our model to data from Africa and find a similarly strong preference for the grid among households there, underscoring the external validity of our results. Burgess, Robin Greenstone, Michael Ryan, Nicholas Sudarshan, Anant 2026 The Effect of Climate Risk on Agricultural Inputs Use of Western African Smallholders: A Panel Data Analysis through CRE–PPML https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:eapoaf:202606-1&r=&r=dev Weather variability is one of the primary sources of risk in farming, differentiating this sector by most other economic activities. As a risk factor, it may not only im- pact farmers directly when detrimental realizations occur, but also indirectly by shaping their behavioural responses. The present paper investigates the role of climate risk in shaping farmers’ decisions on three important agricultural inputs: inorganic and organic fertilizers, and pesticides. By using a short but large panel spanning over eight West African countries, we test several long–term climate risk indicators through Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood adopting the Correlated Random Effect device. Hurdle models are further adopted to disentangle the effects on adoption rate and on intensity of use. The scarcity of precipitations negatively impacts both the adoption and the in- tensity of use of pesticides. For organic and inorganic fertilizers, instead, adoption is negatively affected, while intensity, among the adopters, is fostered. All other tested indicators of climate risk are not significant. The risk of scarce precipitations can be identified as a cause of under–utilization of agricultural inputs in Western Africa that deserves to be addressed. Rogna Marco 2026-06 Refineries, Pipelines and Petroleum Fields - The Impact of Oil on Conflict Around the World https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12761&r=&r=dev We study how global oil price shocks affect the spatial distribution of violent conflict. Combining monthly georeferenced data on oil infrastructure with conflict events worldwide over 1989-2021, we exploit exogenous variation in world crude oil prices within countries using grid-cell and country*month fixed effects. Oil price increases raise organized conflict in oil-bearing cells but reduce it in nearby non-oil areas, indicating a spatial reallocation of territorial violence toward economically valuable locations rather than a uniform increase in conflict. By contrast, lower-intensity unrest spreads across neighboring cells, consistent with diffuse grievance and mobilization channels. The effect is strongest for petroleum fields and driven by state-based conflict, consistent with intensified contestation over oil rents, while downstream infrastructure is associated with protests and localized violence. The magnitude of the response varies with ethnic exclusion, institutions, geography, and ownership, pointing to rent-contestation mechanisms shaped by local conditions. Axel Dreher Jingke Pan Maximilian Herrmann resource curse, conflict, oil, geoeconomics 2026 The Growth Effects of Natural Disasters: Evidence From A Novel Global Dataset Over 1970-2023 https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/106&r=&r=dev We construct standardized climate anomalies from daily observations and carefully calibrate physical thresholds to identify storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and cold snaps across 196 countries over the period 1970–2023. Using a local projections framework, we estimate the contemporaneous and 2-year effects of each disaster type and collectively on real GDP growth. We find that storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves significantly reduce growth on impact (by roughly 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average), with the largest effects observed in emerging markets and developing economies. Cold spells have no statistically significant impacts. Our estimations also indicate that the initial drop in GDP growth is often not fully offset by a quick rebound, leaving GDP below the pre-disaster trend in the subsequent two years. Severe disasters impose far larger costs. Catastrophic floods can lower growth by up to 3 percentage points (with once-in-100-year storms or heatwaves reducing growth by ~0.5pp and extreme droughts by ~1pp). By combining the estimated global coefficients with each country’s own disaster intensity, we translate the aggregate results into localized growth effects and cross-check them against estimates from a dynamic heterogenous panel model. Finally, rolling-window estimates indicate that the contemporaneous growth impact of storms and heatwaves has attenuated in recent decades, whereas droughts have become increasingly damaging, reflecting divergent adaptation or even maladaptation and vulnerability trends over time. Ha Nguyen Mr. Mehdi Raissi Mr. Bruno Versailles Alice Tianbo Zhang Local Projections; Natural Disasters; Economic Growth 2026-06-05 The State of Food Access in the Souss Valley, South-Central Morocco: Insights from the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) Approach https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05595797&r=&r=dev This study investigates the determinants of household food security among smallholder farmers in the Souss Valley. Recognizing the household as a fundamental unit of food access and stability, the level of food security is assessed using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS), which categorizes households into four groups: food secure, marginally food insecure, moderately food insecure, and highly food insecure. A multinomial logistic regression model is employed to analyze the influence of key household characteristics, including the age and marital status of the household head, household size, farm size, number of livestock units, access to credit, remittances, income diversification, and access to irrigation, on food security status. The results reveal differentiated effects across food insecurity levels. While variables such as the household head's age and household size are associated with marginal food insecurity, access to irrigation and income diversification play a critical role in reducing the likelihood of falling into food insecurity. Mustapha El Jarari Rachid Chayboub Brahim El Morchid Souss Valley, Smallholder farmers, Multinomial logistic regression, HFIAS, Food security 2025-12-16 Paz Total? How Ceasefires Backfire https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:fqxuc_v1&r=&r=dev Ceasefires are often designed to reduce violence while facilitating peace negotiations or humanitarian access. But poorly designed truces can backfire. This paper examines the 2023 ceasefires decreed by Colombia’s government with several organized criminal groups simultaneously under the Paz Total (Total Peace) policy. Using difference-in-differences on a municipality-month panel, we find that while more visible and salient forms of violence such as homicides, terrorist attacks and massacres were unaffected, less visible forms of violence against civilians, such as extortion, forced recruitment of minors, and threats, increased substantially in municipalities with ceasefire group presence. These patterns are consistent with strategic substitution: armed groups shifted from more visible to less visible forms of violence when political constraints changed. We formalize this mechanism in a structural model of strategic violence allocation, calibrate its parameters to the reduced-form estimates, and simulate policy counterfactuals. The calibration implies that roughly a 50% increase in the detectability of less visible forms of violence, through independent verification missions or community reporting systems, would be needed to fully offset the ceasefire’s perverse effects, restoring total violence to approximately its pre-ceasefire level. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of inadequately designed ceasefire agreements and underscore the need for credible monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Vargas, Juan F. Mejia, Daniel Rivera, Andrés F. 2026-06-26 Revisiting the resource curse: Does volatility matter? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fae:wpaper:2024.07&r=&r=dev This paper analyzes the impacts of both natural-resource abundance and natural-resource volatility on economic growth. We apply the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) approach of Gonzales et al. (2005), which is more flexible than the standard fixed-effects model, to data on 87 countries over the 1989-2015 period. Our results suggest that: (i) greater natural-resource abundance significantly raises economic growth, contrary to the resource-curse paradox; (ii) the impact of natural-resource abundance, investment and human capital on GDP growth rate per capita is non-linear, and varies by the level of natural-resource abundance volatility; and (iii) the subsequent GDP growth loss may reach 17 percentage points per year for countries with the highest natural-resource abundance volatility, compared to those with the lowest natural-resource abundance volatility. Volatility in natural-resource revenues and poor governmental responses then seem to drive the resource-curse paradox, instead of natural-resource abundance as such. Yassine kirat Growth, resource curse, natural resources volatility, PSTR, , , , 2024-10 Stabilization without Inclusive Development: Neoliberalism, Economic Liberalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Bolivia https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.29086&r=&r=dev This article reconstructs the economic and social history of Bolivian neoliberalism and evaluates whether economic liberalization reduced or increased poverty and inequality in Bolivia. The historical argument is that the Bolivian neoliberal cycle was not a single event but a layered sequence: hyperinflation and emergency stabilization, the 1985 New Economic Policy, labor displacement and mining restructuring, second-generation reform in the 1990s, capitalization, decentralized state restructuring, commodity dependence, and the social conflicts that culminated in the collapse of the party system. The empirical contribution is to integrate macroeconomic indicators, economic-freedom indices, poverty and inequality series, IMF and financial-reform data, commodity and disaster controls, Bolivian export aggregates, and harmonized historical survey indicators. The preferred design is a heterogeneous instrumental-variables model that instruments domestic liberalization with lagged regional leave-one-out policy diffusion and allows Bolivia to differ from the Latin American average. The central estimate is that a 10-point increase in the Heritage economic-freedom score is associated, for Bolivia, with approximately +4.46 percentage points of poverty at the USD 4.20/day line, +3.61 percentage points at the USD 3/day line, +7.40 percentage points at the USD 8.30/day line, and +3.91 Gini points. These results remain socially regressive in sign after adding export-structure controls to the poverty specifications, although the causal interpretation remains conditional on the exclusion restriction. The article therefore advances a qualified conclusion: Bolivian neoliberalism stabilized hyperinflation, but the historically specific liberalization package appears to have increased social vulnerability and inequality rather than producing inclusive development. Ricardo Alonzo Fernandez Salguero 2026-06 Who Gains and Who Loses from Wind Power? Employment, Displacement, and Spatial Spillovers in Northeastern Brazil https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:nereus:023114&r=&r=dev Wind power deployment is often framed as a source of regional job creation, but its local economic incidence may be sectorally uneven and spatially dispersed. This paper estimates the effects of wind farm expansion on formal labor markets in North eastern Brazil from 2004 to 2019. Using an annual panel of 1, 478 municipalities and a spatial difference-in-differences design, we estimate direct effects on host municipalities and spillover effects on nearby municipalities across industry, commerce and services, and agriculture. The results indicate a pattern of sectoral reallocation rather than broad-based employment growth. Host municipalities experience large short-run gains in industrial employment and establishment counts, while agricultural employment declines, with the strongest evidence in the short run and persistent negative point estimates at longer horizons. Neighboring municipalities also exhibit negative labor market spillovers, especially in industrial wages and wage bills and in short-run agricultural employment and wage bills. Exploratory analyses suggest more negative point estimates in inland municipalities and among low-skilled agricultural workers, although these results are based on smaller effective samples. The findings show that wind farms operate not only as energy-capacity investments, but also as spatially targeted infrastructure shocks with uneven distributive effects across sectors, workers, and municipalities. They also underscore the importance of accounting for spatial spillovers when designing quasi-experimental evaluations of renewable energy infrastructure. Edcleutson de Souza Silva André Luis Squarize Chagas Carlos Roberto Azzoni Aléssio Tony Cavalcanti de Almeida Wallace Patrick Santos de Farias Souza wind power deployment; renewable energy infrastructure; local labor markets; spatial spillovers; difference-in-differences; just transition 2026 Paying for power https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:813&r=&r=dev Developing country governments routinely attempt to collect revenue using threats they cannot systematically enforce. We study how citizens assess the credibility of such empty threats in the context of payment for electricity in Madhya Pradesh, India, where state-run utilities recovered only 60 cents per dollar of power supplied. Using two field experiments covering 30, 000 households with high arrears, we show that the household response to a threat depends on the state's choice of messenger. The first experiment randomly exposes households to reminders, threats, and enforcement action without changing incentives, state capacity, laws, or information about debt. Legal threats delivered by local linesmen-state agents with a history of ignoring non-payment have no effect. Yet identical notices sent by registered mail, bypassing linesmen, reduce arrears by 11.4 percent among recipients, a 241 percent return-on-investment. We hypothesize that choosing compromised messengers changes household beliefs about the state's credibility, implying dynamic effects that we test with the second experiment: a year later, we randomly mail a legal notice to previously-treated households. Past treatments affect future responses. Consumers originally visited by a linesman do not respond, while those not exposed to linesmen reduce arrears. Moreover, when we in crease linesman credibility by requiring them to follow up on threats, this gap narrows. The experimental results are together consistent with a model in which consumers use the state's choice of messenger to infer the threat's credibility, and demonstrate that low-credibility state agents can render threats ineffective. Low-capacity governments may improve revenue collection by bypassing their agents. Burling, Fiona Sudarshan, Anant electricity, threats, messengers, state capacity, taxation JEL Classification: O13, Q48, H26 2026 Political Fragility: The Economic Impact of Coups d’État https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/111&r=&r=dev This study uses an entropy balancing model to show that coups d’état can reduce GDP growth by around 2.3 percentage points in the same year. This is a larger effect than some previous estimates, and is found to be persistent over time, reducing cumulative GDP growth by around five percentage points over the following five years. This study goes deeper than previous research into the drivers of that impact, finding that economic sanctions are an an important reason for the observed lower growth in many cases and that the principal channel is via private consumption and investment. Luc Tucker Idrissa Aladji Aya Fragility; Drivers of Fragility; Coup d’État 2026-06-05 Do Microenterprises Maximize Profits? A Nonrandomized Vegetable-Market Experiment in India https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12833&r=&r=dev We ran a nonrandomized, market-level experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we subsidized vendors in some markets to sell additional produce. The vendors earned over 60% higher profits, excluding the value of the subsidy. Nevertheless, after the subsidy ended many vendors stopped selling the additional produce. Vendors knew about the profitable opportunity and demonstrated that they were capable of exploiting it without assistance. We conclude that their behavior meaningfully diverges from profit maximization when considering take-home pay, likely due to a combination of high marginal costs of effort and feared sanctions from breaking anti-competitive norms. Abhijit Banerjee Greg Fischer Dean S. Karlan Matt Lowe Benjamin Roth Matthew Lowe microenterprises, profits, vendors, collusion, social norms, separation failures 2026