@Charles Kenny do you think emigration is good for basically every country or do you think it is mostly beneficial for low-income countries and could be bad for high-income countries?

@danielyu I really enjoyed your article. I strongly agree with your premise of the need for wages as one of the primary goals of development. If we want people to live better, happier lives, we need to provide them with opportunities for stable employment. Additionally, I think it is probably worthwhile for people to try to start a manufacturing export business in LMICs, though I’m skeptical that it will actually work. My main considerations are the need for local government industrial policy and that it might be more strategic to work with existing firms rather than starting new ones.

It seems to me that it would be very unlikely for an outsider to succeed at setting up the industrial infrastructure required for even light manufacturing like textiles to really be productive. Do you expect someone to go into a country and invest the required capital in roads, ports, energy generation, and other industrial infrastructure required to successfully export even the simplest of manufactured goods? It seems to me like working with local governments will be critical to the success of any export manufacturing venture. I think this is mostly born out in the East Asian examples you cite, where governments played a key role in creating incentives and subsidising the learning by doing process as firms are able to eventually become globally competitive. I’m unsure that any individual, or especially a venture capital firm, will burn through the time and money needed to increase the organizational capabilities necessary to be globally competitive in manufacturing, which is especially capital-intensive.

Here, I find people like Mushtaq Khan and Stefan Dercon illustrative in what they describe as the best ways to increase the likelihood of export manufacturing firms succeeding. I’ll quote Dercon 

“This is not a question of just working with the private sector. Many of the crucial incumbent firms in these settings are too closely connected to the patronage system to be helpful. Alternatively, just focusing on very small firms is no doubt good for the people involved, but it is hardly going to change the elite bargain. A better approach would be to find ways of working with the kinds of domestic private sector firms that could be influential and would flourish if the economy were to shift towards self-sustaining growth. The garment industry in Bangladesh and light manufacturing in Indonesia and Vietnam have thrived on connections with government since the beginning. However, they took up the challenge to compete globally rather than persistently live off protectionism and procurement in return for clientelist payments.”

It seems to me like it would be better for outsiders with expertise in manufacturing or global exports to offer consulting services to already existing firms in LMIC with pre-established connections to local governments and help them grow and gain access to overseas markets. Here I’m also drawing from writing by people like Karthik Tadepalli, writing here https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-businesses

I’m very curious what your thoughts are on this and how you see firm dynamics and industrial policy as being key to economic growth in LMIC. Thanks again! 

@Nithin Coca I really enjoyed your piece on Jakarta's public transport. However, around the time your piece came to press, there was a fatal train crash in Bekasi. The piece itself mentions several other challenges, including the last-mile problem and competition from ride-hailing. While one crash is not a reason for people to avoid public transit, I would wager that people will be more scared to use it given the crash and its high profile. Beyond what you have written in the piece, how should the government attempt create a public transit culture, whereby use is entirely normal and common?

Thank you @danielyu  for your argument on Africa's potential to scale development by value added exports.

I just have a question about the Africa Jobs Fund's cost effectiveness model. Does it input losses to source countries as a result of skilled labour migration? I think this is very important if we are considering health worker migration from an extrawelfarist perspective. 

Which then brings me to @Charles Kenny article on emigration. Thank you for mentioning the safeguards needed to prevent losses incurred by source countries. I fear at the moment, a lot of African countries do not have these safeguards in place and as such, social losses could be greater than individual gains. 

Then I have a few reservations on the benefits you described which I feel is too long to write here. I did take my time to talk about them in my Substack commentary here: https://zubecommentary.substack.com/p/eze-jakpas-abroad

@Lauren Gilbert what most suprised you about starting a new magazine? Was it harder or easier than expected?

Whats the publication schedule @Lauren Gilbert ? I'm enjoying the one-article-per-week cadence, can we look forward to weekly articles indefinitely?

Question for @Lauren Gilbert - who are your favourite global health and development authors who you have not yet published? 

is there much unmet demand for clinical trial populations? could developing countries that get good at organizing clinical trials use this as leverage to build up research capabilities, attract FDI, get lower drug prices, participate in other links in the supply chain?

there is lots of TB in Latin American prisons. should they trial Far UV and ventilation technologies there to combat TB and other respiratory diseases?

Dear InDevelopment,

I have a question regarding cash transfers and more broadly the RCT-fication of Development Economics. 

Some time ago, Abhijet Banerjee made a comment about a million RCTs as jigsaw pieces (might have remembered this quote incorrectly). Each RCT might not be that useful but together, they can create something huge. 

I like RCTs and think the Credibility Revolution has been great. Yet, I also wonder that most economies operate like the Toyota process. Come up with a decent plan, start trying it out and keep constantly iterating. At some point, I wonder if all the RCTs might be trying to create a perfect system from the get-go instead of adapting it. The issues of basically identical RCTs for many regular academics with high cumulative expenditure and giving essentially the same answers we knew might also be a concern. My question is, from a very general perspective, have we gone too far towards the Micro-ification of Developmental Economics?

Cash transfers are great (and the article was a nice read), but would we have something better by combining all the money into a more ambitious project? And on average, how many of these big ideas would actually work?

While each RCT is marginally useful and the big ideas are potentially amazing, how would you all try to allocate funding towards the different categories Development studies?

if Iran is able to negotiate better access for their gas to markets like Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Africa, and India, should we expect faster development and poverty reduction in these countries?

do third world research centers like Embrapa and Fiocruz foster much of a cluster of private sector "spinoffs"?

is the Cuban pharmaceutical sector truly successful and innovative, or is that mostly false propaganda hype? how many developing countries can emulate that without threatening fiscal solvency?

are there pro-growth policies in wealthy countries that can lower interest rates in dollars, euros, yen etc and make credit cheaper in low-income countries? for instance if shelter inflation in the US is a disproportionate contributor to overall inflation and therefore prompts monetary policymakers to raise the price of credit to attenuate inflation, could policies like allowing more SROs, ADUs, TOD, townhomes lower interest rates for third world sovereign and non-sovereign borrowers (and their export customers)?

in Ecuador we have some dumb NIMBY rules about setbacks, parking requirements, staircase and elevators rules in relatively short buildings in important cities etc. do you think this kind of thing is an important impediment to growth in many parts of the developing world?

if Europe, the US, China, developed East Asia grow faster, ceteris paribus, does that help growth much in poor countries? is a poor country almost by definition a country that doesn't export very much to those markets? are remittances, technology diffusion a lot more important than exports for most of the poorest countries?

how did smallpox eradication become an appealing idea to powerful people? should there be a sexy tabloid about pharma researchers and campaign leaders that glams them up to encourage more GAVI-like endeavours?

The Time Traveling Economist claims mass literacy is very important. I learned to read in large part thanks to newspapers. They appear cheaper to produce than books. I barely see them in Ecuador. Should states subsidize newspapers for students - perhaps with humor columns and short stories or serialized novels and health columns and transit maps/schedules, concert calendars etc?

Should states heavily subsidize meals in schools?

What should I read about whether Duterte's anti-crime efforts succeeded or failed?
 

do you think China's success in quickly cleaning up air quality in cities like Beijing will be very hard for other developing economies to emulate? what is an example of a development problem that is harder and another that is easier to give us an idea of how hard it is?

congratulations. I look forward to reading more articles in In Development

I imagine some development projects require more study than others, and that study requiring lots of verification and expertise can reduce the velocity of aid execution. Are there some broadly and/or narrowly applicable technologies that are raising the volume and efficacy of aid in general - say LLMS or whatsapp or camera phones - or in specific areas - maybe Lenocapovir being easier to administer than higher-frequency PrEP, or solar panels being easier to put to use at different scales than combined cycle gas plants that need complex engineering and high-caliber customers, say

what do you think of the Malawi Miracle's fertilizer subsidy policies? are we close to technologies that make more natural gas available for fertilizer production, or make meaningfully more fertilizer production from electricity economically viable?

The Jakarta transit article gave me so much hope for my beloved traffic-clogged tropical South American cities. I imagine driver wages account for a lower portion of taxi and mass transit operator expenses in developing countries than they do in rich countries. But buses and taxis seem also to have a bigger mode share in developing country cities than in rich country cities. What effects do you expect from AVs in the developing world? Should we look at rideshare/ AV taxes to fund mass transit?

Is regenerative braking going to make EVs especially useful in the Andes?

Lauren has written interesting articles on electricity pricing in Africa. Do the World Bank's new stances on nuclear and hydroelectric plants stand to make much of a difference? Can solar power installation be a worthwhile make-work program for countries with lots of unemployment, electricity shortages, and messy political economy around construction of new power plants and power lines?

Big stars of poverty reduction like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam seem to use a lot of coal. Are there desirable policy changes that could make more coal available to poor countries? When a country like the US figures out how to reduce coal use, does it usually become much cheaper for poorer countries to buy it?

in my middle-income country the 2 dollar sunglasses at the supermarket as well as the four hundred dollar mobile phones are made in China. with China still so efficient at production of low-end goods, is there much opportunity for other poor and middle income countries to gain manufacturing market share in textiles etc?

is there a localized flying geese thing, or like a gravity model of development? if emigration helps source countries a lot, should donors, MDBs etc focus on helping promising countries low and middle income countries that receive lots of economic migrants and border less promising low-income countries? for example South Africa seems to have some interesting industrial capabilities, has a lot of native poverty, and also receives lots of migrants from other poor countries. in that way it may be a better candidate for credit and investment than its neighbors, and bolstering its success may also help its neighbors a lot. is this kind of thing worth development professionals' attention? I also think of India as a manufacturer of generic drugs, fertilizers, and solar panels, and an importer of natural gas, oil, coal, and Himalayan hydro that could become more abundantly available to other poor countries if more investment in nuclear power, solar, mass transit, EVs etc can reduce their import volumes. Egypt is another country with nuclear power on the way, plenty of desert to build solar in, lots of manufacturing, plenty of refugees, and a large fertilizer production industry

are GLP-1s about to be protagonists in a massive public health success story in poor and mid income countries? should we expect benefits for economic growth?

does it help for most everyone in a country to speak the same language? should states, dev orgs try to get Portuguese-dubbed content subtitled in Portuguese in front of audiences for fluency and literacy purposes (English, French, Hindi, Arabic stand out too)?

thank you for working for poverty relief and more happiness!