<sc></sc> Corporations and businesses handling minerals downstream have come under increased pressure to show that the minerals they handle are ‘responsibly’ mined, and a diversity of international standards have emerged to guarantee this. This has been particularly the case for minerals emerging from Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), a livelihood that has expanded in the last three decades, but that has come with many environmental and social challenges. Existing research has cast a critical eye on ‘responsible’ mining standards, showing in the case of gold, that they only manage to include a small number of the most well-off ASGM organisations (ASGMOs) because of high entry barriers. In this study we query how ASGMOs become incorporated in these standardising efforts through the case of two different voluntary standards collaborating with Colombian ASGMOs. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s work, we conceptualise these dynamics as articulations. This conceptualisation helps us show that the work of incorporating artisanal mining in ‘responsible’ gold supply chains is socially and political constructed through formalisation brokering and political positioning dynamics. We argue that querying these dynamics is key to understanding the conditions under which these supply chains are constructed and hold together, despite their drawbacks and low uptakes.

Using a newly compiled data set from household surveys from 92 developed and developing countries, we decompose observed urban-rural log wage gaps for each country into the portion explained by skill differences and the unexplained portion. Controlling for urban-rural differences in living costs, larger unexplained wage gaps are evidence of labour market distortions that lead to inefficient allocation of labour across sectors and lower country production relative to its potential. We find that, on average, eliminating unexplained urban-rural wage gaps raises per capita GDP by 9.3 per cent. We also find that measured restrictions on labour mobility are large enough to account for much of the unexplained urban-rural wage gaps. Countries with the largest unexplained gaps tend to have the most severe mobility restrictions and greater religious fractionalisation.

Why are urban gender wage gaps lower in northern than in southern states of India, despite greater gender equality (in non-wage dimensions) in the south? I show that this is due to greater suppression of women’s low-wage employment in the north, resulting in stronger positive selection: selection-corrected gaps that impute wages for the non-employed based on observed and unobserved characteristics are similar for both north and south. I suggest that stronger social norms in the north that stigmatise women’s wage work produce lower employment rates, particularly among less-educated, low-wage women who do not have access to white-collar jobs. These patterns of participation introduce significant selection biases in the measurement of gender wage gaps and help explain why urban gender wage gaps are lower in the north.

Using a survey of nearly 20,000 Mexican residents matched with various earthquakes, we observe evidence that people affected by an earthquake report a lower discount rate, implying a greater level of patience. The effect is stronger for more intense earthquakes and robust to controlling for a series of socioeconomic variables, locality, and event fixed effects. The effect is not driven by changes in risk aversion, expected future income streams, or life expectancy, nor is it impacted by people moving in or out of affected localities. People react similarly regardless of their age at the time of the earthquake, in line with the life-long openness hypothesis. Estimates suggest that the effect of more intense earthquakes diminishes slowly, persisting over decades. This effect is independent of gender but varies with education and subjective well-being. Respondents who have experienced an earthquake adjust their savings and health-related behaviours in ways consistent with a decrease in their discount rate.

The last official household survey in Afghanistan showed that in 2020, close to half of the population of the country was living below the national poverty line. Since then, the country has experienced significant economic and social challenges following the change in political regime in 2021. This paper uses the latest developments in survey-to-survey imputations to estimate comparable poverty rates for Afghanistan. The analysis uses the latest household survey available and imputes poverty on the Afghanistan Welfare Monitoring Survey– a phone survey sampled from the same universe of individuals. Results show that 48.3 percent of the Afghan population was poor as of April-June 2023, a relative decline of 4 percentage points compared to the same months in 2020. The reduction in poverty was concentrated among rural households, with a decline from 51 to 44 percent, while it stagnated in urban areas at around 58 percent. The analysis accounts for seasonality in welfare patterns and implements several tests to validate the results. Trends in the evolution of self-reported welfare and food security make it reasonable to conclude that poverty first increased during the immediate economic contraction following the regime change, and then progressively stabilised.

This paper examines how a substantial resource town contributes to socioeconomic divides within a developing country. Beyond the conventional debate over whether natural resources are a source of ‘curse’, the study highlights the crucial role of local institutions in redistributing resource wealth. Using data from Kyrgyzstan’s national household panel surveys (2010–2016), the study shows that the massive yet unevenly distributed revenue from gold mine Kumtor, which accounted for 12.5 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP in 2020, divides the mining community from other local residents. The company provides exclusive economic benefits to its workers, with no spill-over to non-mining residents. Company workers at Kumtor also exhibit lower levels of trust in local community authorities, who receive greater support from the non-company population. This divide intensifies as gold prices rise and is observed only within a 100-kilometer radius of Kumtor, not at other smaller domestically or foreign-owned mines.

Informal cross-border trade (ICBT) is a prevalent business practice that involves trade by agents who wholly or partly evade payment of duties and charges. Employing an actor-based lens that situates the traders within the broader political economy of border governance, we explore the persistence of ICBT despite government initiatives aimed at fostering the formalisation of trade. Using a qualitative case study of the Simplified Trade Regime at the Busia trading post between Uganda and Kenya, we analyse how traders perceive and respond to interventions aimed at encouraging formal trade. We show that traders’ decisions to trade informally are shaped not only by their familiarity with informal institutions and a mistrust of formal systems but also by the presence of informal trade routes. A key feature of these networks is neopatrimonialism, where traders and border officials have developed complex (but functional) patron-client relationships. We distinguish between traders as being defiant, habitual, unembedded, or transitioning agents, based on their level of embeddedness in patronage networks and their orientation towards formality. These insights underscore the centrality of traders’ agency in the persistence of informality, even when simple interventions promoting formalisation are introduced.

This study aims to provide a better understanding of the recent vast literature on gender agricultural productivity issues in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Due to some discrepancies in research findings, a systematic review and a meta-analysis methods are applied to synthesize the gender agricultural productivity gap (GAPG), and its main drivers as well as to explore the bias when using different empirical approaches of estimation. Overall, 61 studies are selected using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart. Results show that factors related to access and control over productive resources are the main drivers of the GAPG in SSA. Adjusting for publication bias yields a benchmark estimate of 14% of the gap, based primarily on land productivity or output value. The magnitude of this common trend varies by geographical region but not by household framework used. Policy interventions aimed at reducing gender gap in SSA should then be context specific. Furthermore, the meta-regression analysis results reveal that GAPG estimates are affected by study characteristics like gender of the researchers and use of cross-sectional or panel data.