This week on Ideas in Development, Oliver Hanney discusses crime in developing countries with Chris Blattman.
There’s a new LLM using only training data from before 1930.
Michael Wiebe’s replication of Moretti 2021 has finally been published. tldr: the results are likely due to a coding error; moving to an agglomeration does not improve inventor productivity.
DHS data quality varies across regions - and northern Nigeria and Niger’s data looks particularly bad.
You know how you can get melatonin over the counter but it’s prescription in the UK? Gavin Leech and team put together a database of such drugs.
Howard French reviews How Africa Works.
Stephen Brien has a new blog about growth and development - he opens with a post about just how rare sustained growth has been. In the last twenty years, no new country has met the Commission on Growth and Development’s definition of structural transformation (sustained 7% growth for 25 years).1
Drug development is a very expensive, very risky bet with terrible expected value. Owl Posting explains some of the financial engineering that makes it more profitable.
Vietnam is close, I believe.