Tessera

Jim Clifford @jimclifford.bsky.social · last mo.

A bracing new report by the UK engineering skills charity Engenuity finds that skill gaps in the UK's manufacturing and engineering sectors cost an annual total of... £5.2 billion. That's a pretty mammoth sum, but includes only firm-level impact. It doesn't include second-order effects, eg. fiscal.

Mind the Gap | Engineering & manufacturing skills report | Enginuity

A major new Enginuity report exploring the skills challenges facing UK engineering and manufacturing SMEs. Access the full report and findings.

enginuity.org

It took me months to figure out how to extract 30,000 careers from the Colonial Office List; it took a little over a day to repeat the full process for the Indian Office List. The visualization now shows the very different global geography of these two bureaucracies in the British Empire.

John Springford @johnspringford.bsky.social · last mo.

Late to this, but interesting to see that Germany became the leading provider of ODA in 2025. www.oecd.org/en/data/insi...

A side point - estimates of the fiscal impact of immigration need to take these spillovers into account, as @mclem.org does here. www.iza.org/publications...

The Fiscal Effect of Immigration: Reducing Bias in Influential Estimates

Immigration policy can have important net fiscal effects that vary by immigrants' skill level. But mainstream methods to estimate these effects are pr...

iza.org

Jonathan Portes@jdportes.bsky.social · last mo.

New paper from Giovanni Peri et al: "The immigration impact on population, labor productivity, investments and TFP in OECD countries." Finds non-OECD immigration boosts productivity & GDP per worker because it increases human capital & stimulates investment. www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/sint...

We find that immigration from non-OECD countries has been a significant driver of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, is associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Positive immigration shocks and surges and more open immigration policies, are likewise associated with improved economic performance. By contrast, native population growth has either no effect or a weakly negative effect on GDP per capita and productivity growth. The estimated coefficients on immigration, while positive, are often imprecisely estimated. Still, their magnitude and direction are important and consistent with a large and growing literature documenting the positive effects of immigration – especially high-skilled immigration – on productivity, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

Grantham Research Institute at LSE @granthamlse.bsky.social · last mo.

Interesting research commissioned by the Government of Somalia trying to quantify the extent / likely impacts of ODA cuts. It emphasises how cuts are a huge negative shock across the board, at the household and macro level. Suggests 68% of INGOs reduced international staff by up to half...

Quantifying the Impact and Charting Viable Policy Pathways (Volume I) | Ministry of Finance - Somalia

mof.gov.so

We regret that our event on Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world has been cancelled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office. Our apologies to everyone who was planning to attend the event.

An excellent short paper from @nrdc.org's Ilmi Granoff conceptualising when, why, and how (and whether) different adaptation options are financeable. It breaks adaptation activities into four financeable categories in a way that I find very helpful and will probably use.

Adaptation Finance Has a Cash Flow Problem: Can We Fix It?

NRDC’s new framework explains what makes adaptations financeable.

nrdc.org

I hadn’t fully realised this: it is the usury of the Foreign Office that is forcing the gutting of the British Council, an agency central to UK soft power efforts? Bizarre. Glad the repayment period is being lengthened- but still bizarre. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Migration Studies @migrationjrnl.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Cool new research from @mclem.org, Nice, & Rigol! Authorising work for asylum seekers is politically contested, often due to perceived 'magnet' effects + fears for local labour markets. New evidence from the US finds work authorisation boosts local wages + GDP, and *doesn't* have a magnet effect.

Economic and Magnet Effects of Work Authorization for Asylum Seekers: Descriptive Evidence from the United States

ROCKWOOL Foundation

rfberlin.com

How do immigration bureaucracies demonstrate accountability beyond formal political oversight? @A.Ellermann and @M.Paquet show how immigration departments direct accountability to different audiences, shaped by institutional design and politicization. doi.org/10.1093/migr...

Guy Abel@guyabel.bsky.social · 2mo ago

'Here we present a new dataset of annual origin-destination migration across 230 countries and regions from 1990 to the present [2023], integrating diverse data sources into a unified modelling framework... A paradigm shift for the computational toolset hitherto used to model global migration.'

🚨Out today in @nature.com our new paper uses deep learning to map four decades of global human migration. By building the first comprehensive, four-decade dataset of annual flows (1990-2023), we reveal that global migration has nearly tripled since 2000. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fascinating to see planned relocation the subject of an FT Editorial Board article! 'With national funds already stretched, the authorities will need to make difficult but necessary trade-offs. That begins by prioritising what assets need to be protected.'

The hard truths about England’s receding coastline

The entire shoreline cannot be protected from erosion, but the state can mitigate future fallout

giftarticle.ft.com

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Another cool piece today on VoxDev- harmonisation of pre-2013 night-lights data with post-2013 data to allow longer-term analysis. And the data (and replication code) is open source.

🆕 An improved nighttime-lights dataset for development research Today on VoxDev w/ Giorgio Chiovelli (Universidad de Montevideo), Stelios Michalopoulos (Brown University), Elias Papaioannou (London Business School) & Tanner Regan (George Washington University): https://ow.ly/r7gw50Z9gnl

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is really neat! Just generally fascinating work. 'Very high-resolution imagery is expensive and not always available... We detect markets by stacking many images from the same location over time and identifying places where the appearance changes *regularly* on specific weekdays'.

🆕 Monitoring markets from space Today on VoxDev, Tillmann von Carnap (University of Oslo) & Anna Tompsett (Stockholm University) show how tracking rural markets using satellite imagery offers a new way to monitor economic conditions in remote and data-scarce regions: https://ow.ly/Xeq750Z8FXg

The UK Climate Change Committee's mammoth report 'A Well-Adapted UK: The Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk' is out today. I'm glad to see that it grapples (albeit not in the depth we will need in coming years) with adaptation limits and planned relocation/retreat.

Has anyone else come across the Centre for Government Reform, a London think-tank so new it doesn't yet have an advisory council? It seems quite reluctant to say what its policy proposals will be- but some of its wording reminds me of the Heritage Foundation's pre-Trump.2 preparations.

About us - Centre for Government Reform

govtreform.com

Join us on May 14th (12 - 5pm ET in person; 13 - 16:30 ET online) for a fascinating set of discussions on the financing of planned relocations in the context of climate change! Climate change will increasingly require adaptive relocation- but how to sustainably finance it? With a stellar lineup:

Financing Planned Relocation in the Context of Climate Change and Disasters

This public event will bring together global experts and practitioners on planned relocation to assess financing sources and mechanisms, identify remaining policy and research gaps, and discuss challe...

cgdev.org

Interesting new paper on education and emigration across 80 developing economies. Findings: 1. Education expansion significantly increases skilled emigration, indicating that rising educational attainment enhances the international portability of skills

Educating for Export? Brain Drain, Structural Gaps, and the Human Capital Sustainability Dilemma of SDG 4 in Developing Economies

Education occupies a central position in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), reflecting the assumption that expanding educational attainment strengthens domestic human capital and long-run develo....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Financing Planned Relocation in the Context of Climate Change and Disasters

cgdev.org