Published daily by the Lowy Institute

Aid links: labouring along the Belt and Road, carbon cash, more

Cuba’s revolutionary struggle, looking back at three decades development work, and stories from the aid sector.

Workers take down a Belt and Road Forum panel outside the venue of the forum in Beijing in April (Photo: Greg Baker via Getty)
Workers take down a Belt and Road Forum panel outside the venue of the forum in Beijing in April (Photo: Greg Baker via Getty)
Published 26 Jun 2019   Follow @AlexandreDayant

  • The UN has partially suspended its aid to parts of Yemen controlled by Houthi rebels, accusing them of misappropriating supplies.
  • Interesting piece by Richard E. Feinberg on Cuba, talking about how the weakening of two foundational pillars of the revolution – regional equality and social betterment ­– will test regime resiliency.
  • Who are the “winners and losers along China’s Belt and Road”, Beijing’s trillion-dollar infrastructure project, connecting Asia together? This is a question to which labour mobility is an important component of the answer, according to Indermit Gill, Somik V. Lall, and Mathilde Lebrand.
  • Talking about labour mobility, new research looks at intergenerational mobility flows in Africa, compiling statistics of upward intergenerational mobility (the likelihood that children born to parents that have no primary schooling will do so) and downward mobility (the probability that offspring of parents with completed primary education fail to do so). Results are pretty striking!
  • Still on mobility, Sarah Bermeo, an associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, discusses the links between US aid, immigration and the troubles of Central America.
  • Here is a great interview with Dr Rachel Glennerster, former head of the Development Lab at MIT and current Chief Economist at the UK’s foreign aid agency DFID, talking about the development of aid work over the past three decades, the spread of the randomized controlled trials, and the market of carbon.
  • About Carbon, Ed Yong reports on an interesting new study by Seema Jayachandran, from Northwestern University, looking at a new concept: “Carbon for cash”. He finds that paying landowners in low-income countries subject to deforestation to not cut down their trees is a cost-efficient argument in the fight against carbon emission.


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