This week in In Development Magazine: Enlli McAleese writes about why it takes so long for new medications to be submitted to major African markets - and how the African Medicines Agency hopes to fix that.1
Deena Mousa points out that we don’t know how to make Malawi not-poor - and if we don’t know how to make countries not-poor, we should take all projections about AI-enabled growth with some salt.
Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart talk to Ed Glaeser on Ideas in Development. Unfortunately for the train lovers in the audience,2 he says: “Forty years of transportation economics at Harvard can be boiled down to four words. Bus good, train bad.”
Major Caleb Watney win: NSF announces $1.5B for X-Labs.
The San Marino televote in Eurovision is actually a synthetic control - since San Marino uses the Italian phone network, the EBU “simulate[s] a composite score using average televoting results from an undisclosed pre-selected group of countries”.3
There is a newspaper in Chennai that is still handwritten. It has a circulation of 22,000?!?
There are a lot of reasons I’m glad we ran this piece, but I’ll simply note that the Wikipedia page on the AMA is so bad that the participating countries list simply trails off into “etc”. There is an extreme lack of non-technical pieces about the AMA, and I’m so glad Enlli McAleese wrote one for us.
I know who you are.
Claude would like me to tell you this is only similar to a synthetic control if this is a weighted average of countries with similar pre-treatment characteristics to San Marino. (And even then, it’s more of a synthetic treatment, rather than a control.) Yes, Claude, we’ve all read Abadie 2003.