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Reference
Giorgio Chiovelli, Michalopoulos, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2025). Landmines and Spatial Development. Econometrica, 93(5), 1739–1778. https://doi.org/10.3982/ecta17951
The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15242012
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🎙️ Welcome, welcome, welcome into Revise and Resubmit — the podcast where big ideas meet bold voices, and where research steps out of the ivory tower to shake the ground beneath our feet.
Today’s journey takes us into a story that starts in silence — the silence of abandoned battlefields. A silence that hides a deadly secret beneath the soil: landmines.
💥 These hidden killers don’t vanish when wars end. They linger. They dictate how villages grow, how roads are built, how farmers plant their crops. They shape the economy long after the soldiers are gone.
But what if we could pull them out, one by one? Could a cleared path become a corridor of commerce? Could a mined-out field turn into a beacon of opportunity, visible even from space? 🌍✨
In their groundbreaking article, “Landmines and Spatial Development”, published on September 16, 2025 in Econometrica — yes, that’s right, one of the most prestigious FT50 journals — scholars Giorgio Chiovelli, Stelios Michalopoulos, and Elias Papaioannou dig deep into Mozambique’s remarkable transformation from one of the world’s most mine-infested countries in 1992… to mine-free by 2015.
Armed with georeferenced data, satellite light, and razor-sharp econometric tools, they uncover not just productivity gains from landmine clearance, but something even more powerful: the hidden highways of economic life — market access. And here’s the twist: it’s not the cleared farmland alone that drives prosperity, but the reopening of transportation routes that supercharge the economy. 🚜➡️🚚➡️📈
So here’s the question for you, dear listener: when rebuilding war-torn nations like Ukraine, is the real weapon of peace not in removing what lies beneath the ground… but in reconnecting what lies between us? 🤔
🙏 Huge thanks to the brilliant authors Chiovelli, Michalopoulos, and Papaioannou, and to the publisher John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Econometric Society, for bringing this work to the world.
And hey, if this sparked your curiosity, don’t forget to subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify 🎧, or catch us on YouTube at Weekend Researcher 🎥. We’re also streaming on Amazon Prime 📺 and Apple Podcast 🍎. Stay tuned, stay curious, and never stop revising what you think you know.
👉 Now tell me — want me to make this intro a bit shorter and punchier for audio delivery, or keep it as a narrative-rich long form like this?
