- Climate change and economics: in a study published in Nature, a team of researchers identify a strong relationship between a region's average temperature and its economic productivity. The Washington Post summarises it here.
- Justin Trudeau, the Liberals, and a whopping 200 rookie MPs swept into office last week in Canada. Aniket Bhushan analysed the policy platforms of the major parties in the lead-up to the vote to see where Canada might be heading on international development.
- Médecins Sans Frontières continues to apply pressure on the US to determine what happened when it bombed an MSF-run hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan this month resulting in 22 deaths. MSF's USA executive director Jason Cone took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times calling for an independent investigation.
- Reporting from the World Bank shows global remittance growth to developing countries falling from 3.3% in 2014 to 2% in 2015. Remittance flows, however, are still larger than foreign aid, and more stable than private capital flows. The cost of sending remittances remains stubbornly high.
- It has been 25 years since Paul Romer's seminal paper on endogenous growth, showing how the discovery of new ideas lies at the heart of economic growth – a theory that any student of economics from the past decade will know all too well. Chad Jones discusses Romer's contribution, while Romer himself looks back at how he got the idea and the role of cities and technology in spreading ideas.
- Over on the Devpolicy blog we have a cautionary tale from Mongolia of the CGD's much touted oil-to-cash proposal to avoid the political and institutional curses that natural resources often bring.
- Finally, web comic XKCD, an internet favourite, teamed up with the Gates Foundation to mark World Polio Day on 24 October:
