Thailand, hosting the 29th ASEAN Labour Ministers' Meeting later this month, have put out an interesting press statement. (Interesting, that is, by the standards of what is the important but undeniably boring policy area of skills recognition):

Thailand Brings Workforce Development to Regional Agenda at the 29th ASEAN Labour Ministers' Meeting

thailand.prd.go.th

A close-to-home article on planning + cost of climate adaptation infrastructure. The Thames Barrier was expected to defend London from rising seas until 2070. But extreme weather means it may need replacing by *2050*, costing £20bn+. Replacing it will take ~30 years- so a decision is needed soon.

Thames Barrier may need £20bn replacement far sooner than expected

Extreme weather has put London’s flood defence under strain, senior government officials warn

giftarticle.ft.com

New @cgdev.org blog with @helen-dempster.bsky.social on the UK Migration Advisory Committee's recommendations on the sub-graduate occupations to get access to Skilled Worker visas. We think the MAC's done quite a good job, but that the process should give more focus to reliability of labour supply.

Why the UK Must Put Labour Supply At the Heart of its Visa Access Policy

The UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has published its recommendations on which occupations should be eligible for Skilled Worker visas. In this blog we assess the MAC’s recommendations and sug...

cgdev.org

This is a pretty abject failure from both government and business. We've known for years the economy is going to electrify and we will need thousands more electricians. And yet the pipeline of new skilled workers entering the sector has barely grown. www.businessgreen.com/news/4533537...

'Effectively static': Electrician numbers plateau despite looming net zero skills gap

EXCLUSIVE: Number of electricians working in England saw net increase of barely 1,000 last year, despite need to add more than 32,000 skilled workers to the workforce by 2035

businessgreen.com

Why is Africa's growth not boosted by quicker regional/continental integration, asks Bright Simons? 'When customs duties account for 20 to 40 per cent of revenue across much of the continent, finance ministers without alternative fiscal channels have an incentive to delay.'

Don’t blame colonialism for Africa’s trade woes

The continent’s growth is being hemmed in by blocked trade arteries, not arbitrary borders drawn in Berlin in 1885

giftarticle.ft.com

Which immigrants do people prefer and why? Many point to skill levels, but @mfreino.bsky.social @isabel-ruiz.bsky.social and I argue people also consider the social value of work immigrants do, even if considered "lower" skilled. Open access in @ejprjournal.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1017/S147... 🧵

Interesting graph on apprenticeship applications from a new paper by @rwi.bsky.social. 'Green' occupations demonstrate much more resilient interest among applicants than non-green. But apprenticeship applications have cratered across the board- hard to see how Germany produces the workers needed.

Useful new European Labour Authority report on labour shortages and surpluses in Europe in 2025. Among other things, 'the observed growth in both employment in green occupations and green skills requirements underlines a widening skills gap...

Latest important research from PIIE's Michael Clemens: Firms allowed to hire immigrant manual laborers expand to hire more Americans www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

Firms allowed to hire immigrant manual laborers expand to hire more Americans

The US government has recently enacted the largest shift in immigration policy since 1924. As officials restrict unauthorized immigration, they face a stark choice: create offsetting lawful channels f...

piie.com

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.

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.

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...

Jonathan Portes@jdportes.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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...

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...

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...

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...

'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.'

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

🚨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

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.

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🆕 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

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'.

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🆕 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

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

'The alarm is particularly acute in India, which has a government target of building 100km of highway a day and which imports about 40 per cent of its bitumen, almost all of it from the Gulf.' This seems a nice natural experiment in road rollout effects for someone!

Alarm spreads among road-builders as Iran war bitumen shortage bites

Soaring cost of asphalt hits highway projects in India and South Korea and repairs from Italy to Australia

giftarticle.ft.com

How do states reconcile free movement with national control? Comparing Mercosur, ECOWAS, and the EU, @Z. Perko shows that despite different institutional contexts, states rely on similar mechanisms such as conditionalities, selective incorporation, and ambiguous compliance. doi.org/10.1093/migr...