Developing Issues
The Demographic Race between India and China
Guillaume Marois, Stuart Gietel-Basten & Wolfgang Lutz
Population Research and Policy Review, June 2025
Abstract:
As India surpasses China as the world’s most populous country, questions arise as to whether this demographic shift will lead India to overtake China economically. This paper examines this demographic race beyond population size. Using multi-dimensional demographic projections by age, sex, education, and labor force participation, we show that China’s current apparent demographic travails will not necessarily threaten its leading status relative to India for most of the next half century given India’s disadvantage in educational attainment and very low female labor force participation. India’s young population could provide a demographic dividend later this century, but only if it makes substantial investments in education and increasing women’s labor force participation rates. The demographic race between giants will be determined more by human capital development than simply by total population size.
Innovation and the Great Divergence
Stephen Broadberry & Runzhuo Zhai
University of Oxford Working Paper, September 2025
Abstract:
Recent developments in historical national accounting suggest that the timing of the Great Divergence hinges on the different trends in northwest Europe and the Yangzi Delta region of China. The positive trend of GDP per capita in northwest Europe after 1700 was a continuation of a process that began in the fourteenth century, while the negative trend in the Yangzi Delta continued a pattern of alternating periods of growing and shrinking, but reaching a new lower level. These GDP per capita trends were driven by different paths of innovation. TFP growth was strongly positive in Britain after the Black Death, in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century and again in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century. Although TFP growth was positive in China during the Northern Song dynasty, it was predominantly negative during the Ming and Qing dynasties, in the Yangzi Delta as well as in China as a whole.
Longevity, Education, and Income: How large is the triangle?
Hoyt Bleakley
Journal of Health Economics, September 2025
Abstract:
While health affects economic development and wellbeing through a variety of pathways, one commonly suggested channel is a “horizon” mechanism in which increased longevity induces additional education. A recent literature devotes much attention to how much education responds to increasing longevity, while this study asks instead what impact this specific channel has on wellbeing (welfare). I note that death is like a tax on human-capital investments, which suggests using a standard tool of introductory economics: triangles. I estimate the (triangular) gain from reoptimization when education adjusts to lower adult mortality. Even for implausibly large responses of education to survival differences, almost all of today’s low-human-development countries, if switched instantaneously to Japan’s survival curve, would place a value on this channel of less than 3% of income. (This contrasts with a 40% ‘rectangle’ that they would gain even if education were held fixed.) Calibrating the model instead with well identified studies, I find that the horizon triangle for the typical low-income country is less than a percent of lifetime income.
Left over or opting out? Squeeze, mismatch and surplus in Chinese marriage markets
Pauline Rossi & Yun Xiao
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Marriage is declining in China. Among singles, the probability of marrying in 2019 was half that of marrying in 1999. We estimate a Choo and Siow (2006b) model using census data to quantify the relative roles of changes in population structure and changes in marital surplus, i.e., the value of marriage. We find that the increase in the supply of educated people explains half of the decline, partly due to a mismatch between highly-educated women and less-educated men. The deterioration of female-to-male ratio, known as marriage squeeze, explains an additional 13% for men. The decrease in surplus accounts for the remainder.
The Economic Effects of ‘Excessive’ Financial Deepening
Rachel Cho, Rodolphe Desbordes & Markus Eberhardt
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the causal implications of high levels of financial deepening for economic development and banking crises in a panel of countries over the past seven decades. We adopt a factor-augmented heterogeneous difference-in-differences estimator and find, in contrast to the existing literature, that very high levels of financial development do not lead to lower long-term economic growth or a higher likelihood of banking crises associated with ‘credit booms gone bust’ cycles or excessive capital inflows. We submit this null result to a battery of robustness checks adopting alternative specifications, alternative aggregate data for households vs. firms, and carrying out theory-driven heterogeneity analysis.
Taken Not Given: The End of Slavery in Britain
Simon Newman
Law and History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between the mid-seventeenth and the late-eighteenth centuries thousands of enslaved people were brought to the British Isles. Many were enslaved, and they were publicly bought and sold, marked by brands, collars and manacles, and some were sent from Britain into plantation slavery. Slavery did not, hoverer, flourish in Britain. By the time of Somerset v Stewart (1772) and Knight v Wedderburn (1778) the large majority of people of color in Britain were free, many of them self-liberated. Despite the best efforts of enslavers to maintain their property rights in people, the enslaved regularly escaped. Newspaper “runaway advertisements” were invented in London during the second half of the seventeenth century, and between the 1650s and 1770s they reveal the development of the freedom seeker in the public sphere. The Somerset and Knight decisions did little to change slavery in the British Isles but rather confirmed a change that was all but complete. The most significant impact of the decisions was in the colonies, where planters interpreted the courts’ actions as evidence of a growing imperial threat to the institution of slavery.
Is it Possible to Raise National Happiness?
Alberto Prati & Claudia Senik
University College London Working Paper, June 2025
Abstract:
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA. When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
Accountable to Whom? Public Opinion of Aid Conditionality in Recipient Countries
Richard Clark, Lindsay Dolan & Alexandra Zeitz
International Studies Quarterly, September 2025
Abstract:
When donors extend foreign aid, they often attach requirements to these funds. While requirements are intended to improve the effectiveness of aid, they also render recipient governments accountable to donors. How does the public in recipient countries view these requirements attached to development finance? We argue that individuals’ assessment of aid requirements is a function of their trust in their own government, as well as the foreign donor. When citizens trust their government, aid requirements activate sovereignty concerns, and individuals view them negatively. But when individuals distrust their government, they see requirements as a source of external accountability. Citizens also consider the donor; foreign accountability is welcome only if the donor is trusted. We test our argument using Afrobarometer data on public attitudes toward aid conditionality and an original survey fielded in Kenya, finding evidence that supports our contentions. Our study contributes to an understanding of accountability in global governance.
The coherence of US cities
Simone Daniotti, Matté Hartog & Frank Neffke
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 September 2025
Abstract:
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city’s capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by measuring the coherence of the economic activities they support, defined as the technological distance between randomly sampled productive units in a city. We use this framework to study how the US urban system developed over almost two centuries, from 1850 to today. To do so, we rely on historical census data, covering over 600M individual records to describe the economic activities of cities between 1850 and 1940, as well as 8 million patent records and detailed occupational and industrial profiles of cities for more recent decades. Despite massive shifts in the economic geography of the United States over this 170-y period, average coherence in its urban system remains unchanged. Moreover, across different time periods, datasets, and relatedness measures, coherence falls with city size at the exact same rate, pointing to constraints to diversification that are governed by a city’s size in universal ways.
Women's international football success and women's economic freedom
Craig Depken & Tomislav Globan
Contemporary Economic Policy, October 2025, Pages 714-730
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of women's political and economic freedom on success in women's international football. We hypothesize that as women achieve political and economic freedom, the country's women's national team experiences reduced on-pitch performance in the short run but over time greater economic and political freedom opens voluntary opportunities for women to pursue football at earlier ages which generates improved on-pitch performance in the longer run. The empirical evidence supports these two hypotheses suggesting that the overall benefits of increased political and economic freedom for women in international football are not immediate but are, nonetheless, concrete.