Urban agriculture is often promoted for its potential to empower women and advance gender equity. Yet, quantitative evidence on the relationship between women’s and men’s work in urban agriculture and intra-household decision-making remains scarce. This study examines how gendered labour contributions are associated with women’s input into household decisions. We use farmer and trader survey data from two towns in north-central Ethiopia and analyze multinomial and ordered regressions and entropy balancing models. We find that men dominate part-time farming, while women lead full-time trading. Labour intensity is associated with heterogeneous and non-linear patterns in women’s decision-making power. Among farmers, greater male labour is associated with sole decision-making by husbands, while among traders, decisions shift toward joint decision-making. Policies should support women’s work while strengthening their control over income to prevent existing gaps between labour contributions and decision-making power from widening.
This study examines how employment shapes food security outcomes among internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Burkina Faso. We use a random-effects multinomial logit and a panel fixed effect regression methods for this investigation. Human capital and demographic characteristics shape which jobs IDPs obtain: formal education raises non-agricultural self-employment, adults over 40 are more likely to farm, and women are less likely to hold salaried work or to farm but more likely to be self-employed. Larger households shift away from family farming towards self-employment. Furthermore, only salaried employment significantly reduces the food insecurity. Overall, these findings highlight the central role of stable and productive employment in strengthening food security and resilience among IDPs.
Theories of international socialization and Europeanization have frequently been used to explain changes in international development policies (IDPs) in aid donor countries. While this literature agrees that international pressure usually has only limited impact, there remains a lack of understanding around situations where states adopt certain, often only technical, international norms, but disregard other, more political ones. The paper uses the case of Hungary’s IDP, an unlikely candidate for international socialization. While the rhetoric and practice of Hungary’s IDP reflected the Orbán government’s nationalist-conservative ideology, the influence of the EU and the OECD DAC was also identifiable. After 2020, Hungary implemented many technical reforms to conform with recommendations from these bodies, including strengthening legislation, increasing transparency, and improving financial and tendering processes. These changes can be explained by cost-benefit analysis and ‘creative compliance’: Hungary hoped to gain financial benefits through greater access to EU funds, without compromising on government ideology.
Triangular cooperation (TrC) has gained prominence in a rapidly changing international development landscape. While policy accounts often emphasise its presumed advantages such as complementarity and horizontality, the motivations and barriers that shape state engagement and non-engagement remain insufficiently understood. Following PRISMA, this article offers the first systematic review of 53 peer-reviewed studies published between 2009 and 2025. Organising the synthesis around five recurring themes informed by established theoretical perspectives, the review shows that motivations and constraints vary asymmetrically across actors. Traditional donors are frequently associated with adaptation and influence preservation; emerging donors combine concerns about learning, legitimacy, identity, and policy autonomy; and recipient countries, though less examined, are associated with resource diversification, bargaining leverage, and ownership concerns. The findings suggest that the TrC literature has moved beyond early policy expectations towards more differentiated explanations of cooperation, power, and institutional complexity. However, the field remains insufficiently theorised and empirically uneven across actors, regions, and case types, leaving important analytical tensions unresolved. Future research should engage theory more systematically, particularly critical perspectives, and bring recipients to the centre of analysis. The article contributes to TrC scholarship and to broader debates on aid motives, the choice of aid modality, and power asymmetries in international development cooperation.
The debate over the IMF’s conditions for international lending has been ongoing since its inception, with growing concerns about its imposition on developing countries, particularly since the 1980s. In addition to assessing their normative influence, a critical focus is on understanding the economic impact of these conditions in recipient countries. While several studies have examined economic growth in response to aggregate conditionality, there is a lack of research that examines the impact of specific conditions on (i) disaggregated economic outcomes and (ii) productivity rather than economic growth. Based on three macroeconomic datasets on IMF conditions, (economic) development and productivity indicators, this study aims to identify the impact of conditions in 13 distinct policy areas on economy-wide as well as sectoral productivity over the period 1980-2019 in South, East, and Southeast Asian countries. While conditioning on a rich set of control variables, our results, derived from identification strategies designed to be robust to endogeneity, indicate heterogeneous sectoral responses to IMF conditions, consistent in sign across estimators, while economy-wide productivity is largely unaffected. Consequently, we derive sector-specific policy recommendations which are aligned with the effects of extant policy conditions on sectoral productivity.
