- Japan has decided to stop its 40-year official development assistance for China, as China has become the world’s second largest economy.
- Australia gave $5.5 million in relief aid to Indonesia this month after the earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions more. However, the pledge has sparked an online backlash over how Australian aid money to Indonesia is being spent.
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to make India free of single-use plastic by 2022. Most of the country’s 29 states have a full or partial ban, but public awareness is low, and the law is rarely enforced. In this piece, Amrit Dhillon follows the diligence of a “blue squad” enforcing the law in Mumbai.
- The World Bank introduces the World Development Indicators website: a new discovery tool and storytelling platform for its data which takes users behind the scenes with information about data coverage, curation, and methodologies.
- Martien Van Nieuwkoop explains why the World Bank data shows that the number and proportion of undernourished people in the world now exceeds the number of people living in extreme poverty.
- A new report shows that the Millennium Villages project (a program supporting some of the planet’s poorest places in the world), promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, did not have an overall effect on poverty, hunger, or many of the other outcomes it set out to improve.
- Sarah Baird and colleagues re-examine the literature on cash transfers and set out a framework for understanding the different channels through which adult labour supply responds to the receipt of cash transfers.
- In the development sector, it is known that women tend to have preferences that are more pro-social and are less risk-taking and less patient on average. In this research, Falk and Hermle look at how these gender differences in preferences are correlated with economic development and gender equality using survey data on 80,000 individuals in 79 countries.
- And to finish on a fascinating note, read this piece by Simon Allison describing the (strange) meeting between Uganda president Yoweri Museveni and celebrity supernovas Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West.
Aid links: plastic ban, celebrity ties, and more
Japan stops aid to China, what happened to Millennium Villages, and other stories from the development sector.
(Photo: Michael Coghlan/Flickr)
Published 24 Oct 2018
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