- Chris Hoy and Franziska Mager conduct the first cross-country survey experiment on preferences for redistribution in the developing world and find that poor people are not as in favour of greater redistribution as what you might expect.
- Simon Murphy interviews Salma, a worker in a sewing factory in Bangladesh, who sews t-shirts for a Spice Girls ComicRelief campaign intended to “champion equality for women” and highlight how “women earn less”. A reality Salma knows too well. She recounts the inhuman conditions in which thousands of workers endure in this industry. Similarly, Sarah Butler looks at the reasons why garment workers are paid so little in this country.
- A great twitter thread by Rachel Glennerster, on lessons learned over the past year as the UK Department for International Development’s chief economist.
- Stephanie Wykstra outlines the pros and cons of micro-credits as a tool to extract people from poverty.
- Ian Mitchell, the Director of Development Cooperation at the Centre for Global Development, shares his concerns on rumours that DFID might merge with the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
- Henry Foy, Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, and David Pilling write about the increasing presence of Russia in Africa, and President Vladimir Putin’s pivot to the continent.
- In the New Yorker, Ben Taub describes the Iraqi state’s tough response to suspected jihadis and their families, suspecting it might lead to the resurgence of the terror group.
- Finally, Mark Miller, a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, shares his reading list for this month on public finance and development.