VoxDev Development Economics: Recent Episodes
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This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/12UqCmkB4oLLWqoHpT5Lyt?si=6be55d2c81884d65
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8917092-moving-billions-towards-evidence
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/moving-billions-towards-evidence
In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.
In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.
Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.
A farmer in rural Ghana can use her phone to take a picture of a blighted leaf, upload it, and within seconds she gets a diagnosis that takes account of the soil, the weather, and the other local conditions. Score one for AI. We don't have enough human experts because they are hard to train, and harder still to retain, so apps like this have huge potential. But it doesn't mean they will succeed.
Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director at J-PAL, has watched ambitious tech dreams for development fall apart before. Remember one laptop per child, the plan that failed because schools didn't have technical support, the right lesson plans -- or even electricity? He tells Tim Phillips that AI can succeed, as long as whoever is using it has thought through the theory of change, designs for impact rather than downloads, and can scale up successful experiments. J-PAL has launched the AI Evidence Playbook to help policymakers solve these knotty problems.
The research behind this episode
Dhaliwal, Iqbal, Sam Carter, Attaullah Abbasi, and Audrey Lorvo. 2026. AI Evidence Playbook: A Practical Guide. Cambridge, MA: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
To cite this episode
Phillips, Tim, and Iqbal Dhaliwal. 2026. "How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Iqbal Dhaliwal is global executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), based at MIT, and co-chairs Project AI Evidence. He co-directs J-PAL's South Asia office with Esther Duflo. Before joining J-PAL in 2009 he served in the Indian Administrative Service, where he ran a statewide welfare department and led a public company, delivering large-scale programmes in the field. His work spans the design, evaluation, and scale-up of anti-poverty programmes, and the question of when a technology genuinely changes lives rather than dashboards.
Research and concepts cited in this episode
Project AI Evidence (PAIE) is J-PAL's initiative to identify, evaluate, and scale applications of AI for social good, and to scale down those that may cause harm. The AI Evidence Playbook is its practical output, a reference for policymakers, practitioners, and donors weighing whether and how to adopt AI-enabled programmes.
The six pathways. The playbook groups two decades of development evidence into six areas where AI could raise impact or cut cost: improving needs prediction and targeting; increasing access to personalised, timely support; maximising the effectiveness of frontline service providers; improving organisational and programmatic efficiency; reducing bias and ensuring fairness; and boosting government resource mobilisation, including more progressive taxation.
Machine learning targeting in Togo. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Togo's government wanted to reach its poorest households but lacked the administrative data to find them. Researchers used satellite imagery to identify likely-poor neighbourhoods from features such as house size and roof quality, then paired it with mobile phone records to narrow down poorer individuals within them; a practical, rapid way to fill a data gap without a social registry.
Theory of change. The sequence of steps connecting an input to a final outcome. Dhaliwal's point is that most people hold an optimistic hypothesis rather than a theory of change: the inputs and the hoped-for outcome are clear, but the intermediary links, adoption, trust, workflows, repair, are missing. Writing it on paper is where the gaps show.
Design for impact, design for scale. Engagement numbers and downloads are a first step, not proof of impact. Designing for scale means designing for a farmer who may lack a device, may lack reliable connectivity, and may not trust the technology without the extension worker they have known for fifteen years.
One laptop per child, and smokeless stoves. Dhaliwal raises both as technologies whose theory of change was sound but whose delivery was not thought through: the school system could not absorb the laptop, the electricity and connectivity were not there, and no one planned for breakage. The relevant cautionary parallel for AI, whose problems he argues are not just inherited but exacerbated by the pace of change.
Global knowledge, local context. Dhaliwal separates rules that can be changed from genuine context differences. A programme that works in India but "won't work in Ghana" because teachers there work six hours rather than six hours fifteen minutes is a rule problem, and solvable. A classroom of 1:20 versus 1:60 is a real contextual difference worth worrying about.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
The development economics of AI: Lessons and questions. Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa take stock of what an entire series of conversations revealed about where AI helps in development, and where the evidence runs thin.
Related reading on VoxDev.org
AI and development economics: Early evidence and how to keep up, a running VoxDev reading list on the impacts of AI in low- and middle-income countries that includes J-PAL's AI Evidence Playbook among its resources.
If you walk down a street in a low-income country, count the businesses you can see, you will miss many entirely. Someone who cooks at home and sells at the roadside never appears in a registry. What we know about businesses in developing countries has always been incomplete.
In this week's VoxDev Talk, Marcela Eslava (Universidad de los Andes Bogota) talks to Tim Phillips about two decades of research into why firms in developing economies stay small, grow slowly, and rarely break through. A worker in a developing economy is about three times more likely to be running, or working in, one of these very small businesses than a worker in a high income economy, and far more likely to be self-employed, a one-person firm.
Weaker human capital and less access to technology make it harder to start a business. Costlier credit, labour regulation that makes it difficult and expensive to employ staff, and taxes on formal firms make it harder to grow. Some of these distortions are even introduced by well-meaning policymakers, such as low taxes for small firms - which then effectively tax growth.
The research behind this episode:
Eslava, Marcela. 2026. "Firm Size and Dynamics in Less-Developed Economies." Annual Review of Economics, volume 18. Review in advance; changes may still occur before final publication.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Marcela Eslava. 2026. "Why businesses stay small in emerging markets." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Marcela Eslava is Professor of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota¡, and President of the Latin American and the Caribbean Economic Association. Her research spans firm dynamics, productivity and demand at the firm level, labour informality, credit constraints, and the regulations that shape how businesses grow in developing economies.
Research cited in this episode
The Lucas-Hopenhayn framework. The workhorse model of firm dynamics, built on Robert Lucas's 1978 account of occupational choice and Hugo Hopenhayn's 1992 model of entry and exit; it links the size of the average firm to the productivity of potential entrepreneurs and to distortions that stop the most efficient firms from scaling. Eslava's review extends it to explain why firms are smaller in poorer economies.
Nonemployers and micro employers. Own-account and self-employed workers plus the smallest employers; in Eslava and co-authors' sample of 51 economies they account for over 90% of employment in lower-middle-income economies and around 20% in the United States. Their dominance is the main reason average firm size is so low in poorer countries.
Correlated distortions. Taxes, regulations and credit frictions that fall more heavily on high-productivity firms; because they hold back the firms that should be growing, they push labour towards less productive businesses and drag down aggregate output. They show up in the models as residuals, the part of the size gap that productivity and quality cannot explain.
Size-dependent policies. Rules that switch on above an employment threshold, such as the extra workplace obligations that apply to firms above 50 employees in France, or above 20 in Peru; Eslava describes comparing firms just above and just below a threshold as one way to prise open the black box of distortions and measure what a specific rule does.
Demand versus cost efficiency. Work on Colombian manufacturing decomposing a firm's success into technical efficiency and the appeal of its products; the demand side contributes many times more to differences in revenue than cost efficiency does. Eslava's point is that trimming costs buys survival, while product quality and market access drive real growth.
The data-coverage puzzle. Early firm-level studies found average firm size falling as countries got richer, the reverse of what later work established; the anomaly came from datasets that captured only the large, registered firms in poor economies and missed the vast base of tiny ones. Better censuses, and household and employment surveys that count people rather than firms, corrected the picture.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
What have we learned about the informal sector? Gabriel Ulyssea and Mariaflavia Harari on the causes and consequences of informality, the close cousin of micro-enterprise that runs through this conversation.
Related reading on VoxDev
Can variation in firm growth explain the development gap? Colombia vs the US, by Marcela Eslava, John Haltiwanger and Alvaro Pinzón, on how a deficit of superstar plants and an excess of surviving underperformers shape Colombia's development problem.
The links between capabilities and export dynamics in developing countries, on how firm capabilities, product quality and market knowledge shape which firms manage to export.
A river dries up. The soil turns salty. A harvest fails. Farmers across the developing world feel climate change constantly and personally, they rarely blame their government, or demand action.
Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) is one of three authors of a new review of the politics of climate change in the developing world. He tells Tim Phillips that almost all of the existing research on this topic is focused on rich countries, even though the developing world faces the worst of the damage, and has the least capacity to absorb it, because in those countries the link between climate change and political action is more explicit.
Political solutions are needed: developing country income losses could run 60% higher than losses in wealthy countries, and climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty within a decade. Grossman's review turns up a paradox in the public opinion data. Concern runs high even where formal climate literacy is low, because people experience the crisis through a failed harvest or a dried up well, not a scientific chart. This disconnect isn't neutral, because vulnerability isn't simply inherited. It is produced, by decisions about who owns land, whose villages get seawalls, and whose voice counts when climate money is handed out.
The research behind this episode:
Grossman, Guy, Audrey Sacks, and Alice Xu. 2026. "The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 101-126.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Guy Grossman. 2026. "Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded and co-directs Penn's Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), and his research spans governance, forced displacement, political accountability, and conflict processes across the developing world, with a particular regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.
Research cited in this episode
Extreme poverty projections. World Bank economists Bramka Arga Jafino, Stephane Hallegatte, Julie Rozenberg, and Brian Walsh estimate that climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030; the wide range reflects uncertainty over which emissions and development pathway the world follows. Read the working paper.
Afrobarometer. A long running, pan African survey network covering more than 30 countries. Grossman's review draws on it to show that only around four in ten respondents identify human activity as the main cause of climate change, even as concern about its effects runs far higher.
The attitudinal and accountability channels. Two frameworks political scientists use to trace how climate exposure might change political behaviour. The attitudinal channel asks whether living through a flood or a drought changes what someone believes about climate change; the accountability channel asks whether it changes their vote. Grossman finds evidence for both, but little that explains when concern turns into political pressure.
Maladaptation. The academic term for private adaptation that shifts harm onto someone else, such as a village embankment that protects one community by pushing floodwater into the next. Grossman uses it to illustrate why adaptation without government coordination can widen inequality rather than close it.
Ecuador land titling. Mark Buntaine, Stuart Hamilton, and Marco Millones's 2015 study of a titling programme in Morona Santiago found it did almost nothing to slow deforestation, because the state never backed the new titles with enforcement. Grossman cites it as evidence that representation without power tends to fail.
Indigenous managed land. Research led by Stephen Garnett finds that Indigenous peoples, roughly 6.2% of the world's population, manage more than a quarter of the planet's land surface, often protecting carbon sinks more effectively than formally designated protected areas.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
Financing climate adaptation: what works, what doesn't, and can carbon credits help to bridge the gap? Namrata Kala, Rohini Pande, and Catherine Wolfram pick up where Grossman leaves off, on who pays for adaptation when governments won't.
How the urban environment can adapt to climate change. Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng discuss how cities in the developing world can adapt their buildings and infrastructure as climate driven migration accelerates.
Related reading on VoxDev.org
Climate politics: understanding political inaction on climate change. Allan Hsiao and Nicholas Kuipers show that Indonesian politicians underestimate voter concern about climate and pollution, and that correcting their misperceptions does not, on its own, produce policy action; a real world case of the accountability channel breaking down.
Political representation and forest conservation? This finds that transferring formal political power, not just consultation, to India's historically marginalised Scheduled Tribes led to a measurable fall in deforestation.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EacHFVRt9p4
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/has-development-economics-lost-its-way/id1866874059?i=1000775748550
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Lcy3FrbBuoE2nj3cnhOAm?si=76aedb574426479e
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8924691-has-development-economics-lost-its-way
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/has-development-economics-lost-its
What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions?
Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem.
How many maize seeds should farmers plant in each hole? Ask the farmers and they say two or three. Agronomists can show them more reliable seeds, where they only need one.
But change the seed and everything else changes too; the fertiliser, the spacing, the whole system. This is why getting better technology into the hands of African farmers, and helping them to find ways to improve their profits, is so much harder than it looks.
Rachid Laajaj (Universidad de los Andes) and Karen Macours (Paris School of Economics) tell Tim Phillips about an experiment in Kenya in which farmers ran trial plots on their own land for three seasons, comparing input combinations side by side, and were followed for five seasons more.
Farmers adopted the new inputs and their profits fell. But they kept experimenting anyway, season after season, until the losses became gains. The most skilled farmers went first, made the most mistakes, and paid the highest price; their neighbours watched, copied, and adopted at a fraction of the cost.
Each failed attempt costs a farmer a season. Lower that cost, Laajaj and Macours argue, and you change what is possible for millions of farming households.
The research behind this episode:
Laajaj, Rachid, and Karen Macours. 2026. "The Complexity of Multidimensional Learning in Agriculture." Econometrica 94 (2): 465-503.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Rachid Laajaj, and Karen Macours. 2026. "Why farmers struggle to adopt new agricultural technology" VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guests
Rachid Laajaj is Associate Professor of Economics at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, with research spanning technology adoption in agriculture, corruption, and human capital, studied from a micro-development perspective with particular attention to the role of information. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Karen Macours is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, a senior researcher at INRAE, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in the Development Economics programme. Her research spans agricultural productivity, rural poverty, social programmes, and early childhood development. She chairs the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment of the CGIAR and is co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.
Research and concepts cited in this episode
The trials. In 48 randomly selected villages in Kenya, ten farmers per village were invited to run a three-season agronomic trial on a small parcel of their own land, guided by an agronomist. Each trial plot was divided into six subplots; five tested different combinations of modern inputs and one served as a control. The trials occupied a tiny share of each farm, so the direct economic effect was negligible; the point was the opportunity to learn. A further 48 villages served as controls, giving a sample of 960 farmers followed across six seasons of data collection.
Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM). The input combinations tested in the trials followed ISFM principles; a sustainable intensification approach that combines improved seed with mineral fertiliser and organic inputs, adapted to local conditions. Its logic is precisely the multidimensionality the paper studies; the components work through their combination, not in isolation.
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) provided the agronomists who guided farmers through the trials. The paper builds on joint work with IITA.
The target-input model. The workhorse theory of learning in agriculture, in which farmers learn the optimal quantity of a single input through experience; it dates to work by Foster and Rosenzweig in 1995 and underlies much of the literature on social learning, including Conley and Udry's study of pineapple farmers in Ghana. Laajaj and Macours extend it to many interdependent inputs, where adopting one requires re-optimising the others; what Laajaj calls the curse of multidimensionality.
Measuring farmer skills. The origin of this project; Laajaj and Macours spent years developing measures of farmers' cognitive, non-cognitive, and technical skills, work that circulated as CEPR Discussion Paper 13271, "Measuring Skills in Developing Countries" (gated). Asking farmers agronomic questions revealed that many had no single right answer; the answer depended on everything else the farmer was doing.
Employment in agriculture. Macours notes in the episode that agriculture accounts for half of employment in sub-Saharan Africa, rising to as much as two-thirds when the wider agro-food sector is included.
Conservation agriculture. A prominent example of a knowledge-intensive sustainable practice; it combines minimal tillage, crop rotation, and the retention of crop residues, so a farmer must learn several new practices at once and find a combination that works.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
African agriculture's underappreciated supply side. Hope Michelson on the other half of the adoption puzzle; the markets and firms that supply seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides to smallholders.
Strengthening climate resilience in agriculture. Tavneet Suri on how small-scale farmers respond to extreme weather, and the seed varieties that protect crops against floods and droughts.
Combining improved seed varieties and index insurance to address drought losses. Paswel Marenya on a trial in Mozambique and Tanzania that paired drought-resistant seeds with insurance.
Related reading on VoxDev
Agricultural Technology in Africa, the VoxDevLit surveying the evidence on what drives, and blocks, technology adoption by African farmers.
Improving agricultural extension and information services in the developing world, drawing lessons from nearly fifty randomised evaluations of constraints on smallholder productivity.
Encouraging agricultural technology adoption through autonomy: evidence from Mexico, on how giving farmers ownership of the adoption process makes new practices stick.
Harnessing the benefits of digital agriculture for smallholder farmers in East Africa, on text-message-based extension programmes evaluated in Kenya and Rwanda.
Wars get the headlines. A civil war can wreck a country's economy and dominate its news for a decade. But if you assume war is the most costly form of violence a society faces, you would be wrong.
In this week's VoxDev Talk, James Fearon (Stanford) joins Tim Phillips to argue that the violence happening quietly inside homes and on ordinary streets does far more damage than war and terrorism combined.
Drawing on his new book Worse Than War (PUP), written with Anke Hoeffler, Fearon estimates that interpersonal violence, meaning homicide, intimate partner violence and severe physical abuse of children, kills and injures more people than war, and costs society more too. Large-scale collective violence hits very few countries in any year. Almost every country carries rates of homicide and assault that exceed the global average for war.
Fearon's argument is not that war does not matter. It is that the interpersonal violence is less dramatic and often hidden from view. There is evidence on what works to reduce it, but we aren't giving the problem the attention it needs.
The book behind this episode:
Hoeffler, Anke, and James D. Fearon. 2026. Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and James Fearon. 2026. "Interpersonal violence costs the world more than" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
About James Fearon
James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research spans civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, the evaluation of foreign aid and institution building, and the costs of collective and interpersonal violence. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.
The book is co-authored with Anke Hoeffler, professor of development research at the University of Konstanz and co-author of Breaking the Conflict Trap, whose work on the economics of civil war includes the influential conflict-trap research with Paul Collier.
Research and concepts discussed in this episode
Interpersonal versus collective violence. The book distinguishes collective violence, perpetrated by organised groups such as states, rebel organisations, terrorists, or criminal gangs, from interpersonal violence, committed by individuals. Interpersonal violence is broken down into homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical abuse of children. The central finding is that the average annual cost of interpersonal violence is far larger than that of interstate and civil war, somewhere between five and 20 times larger, with a best estimate of about eight times.
Prevalence, not intensity. The reason interpersonal violence costs more in aggregate is that it is far more widespread. Very few countries experience large-scale collective violence in any given year, but almost all countries carry annual death and injury rates from homicide, intimate partner violence, and child abuse that exceed global average war death and injury rates. For 2000 to 2019, the authors estimate a global annual average of not quite 1.5 deaths per 100,000 people from war and terrorism, against about 7 per 100,000 for homicide.
Intimate partner violence. The authors estimate global annual averages of about 3,300 and 1,600 per 100,000 people for intimate partner physical and sexual assault respectively, which is roughly twice those rates for women specifically.
Severe physical abuse of children. Measured conservatively, capturing beatings far more serious than a mild spanking, the estimates imply that 15% of children aged 14 or younger are subjected to monthly beatings that would be classed as assaults if the victims were adults.
Economic costs versus well-being costs. Civil war can cause severe economic devastation in the worst-affected countries, mainly through reduced growth, and at the global level the strictly economic costs of collective violence may exceed those of interpersonal violence. But economic loss is only one cost. Drawing on methods that use what people pay to avoid risks of death or injury, the authors estimate well-being losses that are far greater for interpersonal violence, because it kills and injures so many more people each year. The authors note that the difficulty of estimating the economic cost of interpersonal violence means their figures probably understate it relative to collective violence.
Why interpersonal violence stays invisible. National media and political debate focus far more on collective violence, partly because it is dramatic and episodic while interpersonal violence is persistent and, happening inside households, often practically invisible. Sustained public and policy attention on the scale of interpersonal violence is itself a step towards reducing its costs.
It is not just "culture". Against the view that little can be done because interpersonal violence is cultural, the authors point to a broad range of programmes and policies with evidence behind them. For homicide and intimate partner violence, measures that reduce alcohol access and consumption. For intimate partner violence and child abuse, adolescent dating programmes and parenting programmes. Across all forms, police reform to improve accountability and training, and more police in countries with low ratios of police to homicides.
Reducing collective violence. There is reasonable evidence that UN peacekeeping operations are a relatively inexpensive way to lower violence in civil war countries and to reduce the chance of war resuming after a peace agreement. The authors note that rising conflict among the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, and sharpening regional rivalries among larger states in conflict-affected areas, have sharply reduced the prospects for new peacekeeping operations for now.
How do courts work when they work well? You would expect them to be impartial, neutral, and consistent. In much of the Global South that is a tall order.
So when courts fall short of it, are they failing?
Development institutions ask states to build strong courts on the North American and Western European model. Good governance follows, they argue. This model treats poorer, less democratic systems as deviations from a norm rather than as institutions doing different work.
Fiona Shen-Bayh (University of Maryland) joins Tim Phillips to review the evidence on what courts in the Global South actually do, and who they help. Where the state is weak, customary elders, NGOs, even rebel groups step in to adjudicate, and people often trust these forums more than the state's own courts.
Taliban courts in Afghanistan upheld due process during civil war. Dictators sometimes build genuinely independent courts, because property rights attract investment and citizens' lawsuits tell the centre what local officials are doing.
The research behind this episode:
Rios-Figueroa, Julio, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2025. "Courts in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 28.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2026. "Courts in the Global South." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Fiona Shen-Bayh is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland. Her research spans authoritarian regimes, judicial politics, and the use of legal and judicial institutions as instruments of power, often drawing on digitised archives and text-as-data methods. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press) won the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize.
The paper is co-authored with Julio Rios-Figueroa, Professor in the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), whose work spans comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies, with a focus on Latin America.
Research cited in this episode
The triad logic of conflict resolution. Drawn from Martin Shapiro's Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (1981). A court is effective when two parties appeal to a third to settle their dispute, and three conditions hold: the parties believe the third party is impartial; the third party is neutral, not predisposed to favour either side; and the rationale for the decision is consistent with existing norms, the idea of precedent. The review deliberately relaxes the assumption that courts are effective only when all three conditions are met.
The rule of law revival. The wave of good-governance programmes promoted by the United States and Western European governments and NGOs after the fall of the Soviet Union, presenting strong courts as a remedy for corruption, instability, and tyranny in the Global South.
The fallacy of legalism. The belief that creating law through statute, legislation, or precedent is enough to bring about social change. The phrase, from Sandra Joireman's work on property rights in Africa, names a habit of thought rooted in the Western experience, where the state has historically enforced property rights and contracts. In much of the Global South the absence of the state does not mean the absence of rules and order.
Stateness. The extent to which a state exercises authority across its territory: its monopoly on violence in the classic Weberian sense, but also the creation of law and the administration of public affairs. Where stateness is low, non-state actors fill the judicial vacuum.
Taliban and Islamic State courts. Recent fieldwork-based research finds that Sharia courts run by the Taliban in Afghanistan upheld notable degrees of due process and impartiality, offering predictability during civil war, and that the coercion associated with the Taliban featured in only a minority of the cases their courts heard.
Courts in authoritarian regimes. A growing literature shows what courts do for dictators: establish credible property rights that attract foreign capital; monitor administrative conflict, as in China, where citizens' grievances against the state feed information upward to the centre; and, at other times, repress opponents or legitimise the regime by delivering popular moral outcomes even against the letter of the law.
Political competition and judicial independence. Electoral competition can sustain independent courts in healthy democracies, partly because divided governments struggle to coordinate against unfavourable rulings. Under instability or an expected change of regime, the relationship can reverse: incumbents pack courts to entrench their interests before leaving, and judges may rule strategically to align with whoever they expect to hold power next, a pattern visible across Latin America.
Access to justice and legal mobilisation. Social transformation through courts depends on people developing a "legal conscience", an understanding of the law and how to use it, and on support structures outside the judiciary: civil society organisations, bar associations, prosecutors, lawyers, and human rights groups that help citizens bring and sustain claims.
Courts and democratic backsliding. Courts hold neither the purse nor the sword, which makes them easy targets for hostile rhetoric, legislative threats, pressure to resign, and court-packing. Courts that are neither impartial nor neutral can still stabilise a democracy while rival parties remain uncertain of each other's intentions, provided both still accept competitive elections. Once a party, especially an incumbent, abandons that commitment, there is little a court can do alone.
Digitised judicial data. The digitisation and free publication of court records across the Global South has opened large-scale, fine-grained study of everyday jurisprudence, useful to scholars and to the judges, lawyers, and litigants who can now see how the law works in their own context.
The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed.
In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's participation in politics, written with Peace Medie (University of Bristol).
They are not elite women with less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.
The research behind this episode:
Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Soledad Artiz Prillaman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
The paper is co-authored with Peace A. Medie, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.
Research cited in this episode
Elite and nonelite women. The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.
The income puzzle. At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.
Vote agency. Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.
Varieties of patriarchy. All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.
Quotas. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.
Collective action. Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.
More from VoxDev
Where are the Indian female politicians?, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.
Related reading on VoxDev
Grassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.
Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.
This episode follows a wide-ranging panel convened at Stanford's King Center on Global Development, featuring Gyude Moore, as well as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, former USAID Administrator and Ambassador Mark Green, and Chair and Founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility Vera Songwe - The future of global development: Approaches and partnerships for a new reality.
Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa will fall by between 16% and 28% this year, according to the IMF. In past downturns, multilateral and humanitarian funding tended to fill the gap when bilateral aid dropped. This time those channels are shrinking too.
Gyude Moore, who ran the Liberian President's Delivery Unit under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, thinks the contraction is structural rather than a passing effect of the Trump administration, and that recipient countries should stop expecting the old arrangement to return. He wants economic growth put at the centre of development rather than treated as one programme among several. Instead of letting donors decide which programmes are run, he says, countries should run a growth diagnostic: a way of identifying the two or three constraints doing most to hold an economy back. Governments can then reorganise their budgets around removing those constraints, and use the diagnostic to decide which offers of aid to take and which to turn down. Moore calls this “sovereignty through analytics”. Aid was meant to be temporary, he argues, and the job now is to quickly reach the point of not needing it.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and W. Gyude Moore. 2026. "The end of aid dependency.” VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
W. Gyude Moore is a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was Liberia's minister of public works from December 2014 to January 2018, and before that deputy chief of staff to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and head of the President's Delivery Unit, which oversaw more than $1 billion of road, power and port projects in a country rebuilding after civil war. He also lectures at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. His work covers African infrastructure, energy, industrial policy and development finance.
Cited in this episode
The scale of the cuts. The IMF's October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa, using OECD figures, projects bilateral aid to the region falling by 16% to 28% in 2025, with more cuts likely. Moore says the cuts to multilateral and humanitarian funding run higher again, and that the most aid-dependent countries have been hit hardest, through weaker health, education and nutrition systems.
Growth diagnostics. A way of finding the constraints that matter most: the one or two that, once removed, allow others to ease. Moore likens it to a doctor running tests before prescribing. The method is associated with the Growth Lab at Harvard. He suggests governments hire an independent party to run the analysis, so the findings cannot be dismissed as political.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation. A US agency that runs what it calls a constraints analysis, then funds the removal of the constraint it finds. Moore offers it as an existing model for diagnostic-led aid, while noting that it has critics.
Sovereignty through analytics. Moore's phrase for using a credible diagnostic to set the terms with donors. A government can say what it is trying to do, ask for help where it needs it, and decline what does not fit. He points to Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe rejecting or walking away from US health agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy as evidence that recipient governments now have that leverage and are willing to use it.
The Development Alliance. Liberia's attempt, around 2014 and 2015, to bring every donor and NGO into one room to map who was doing what, spot duplication and find the sectors nobody was covering. Moore's assessment: useful, but voluntary, not written into law, and not built around a single diagnostic. His conclusion is that such a framework should be put on a legal footing.
Five-year plans. Moore, who teaches in China each autumn, points to the discipline that fixed planning periods impose, and argues that legislation can do a similar job of holding a development strategy steady across changes of government.
Delivery units. Small teams set up to push complex projects through where the wider bureaucracy cannot. Moore ran one in the Liberian presidency and calls them islands of competence; he offers them as a way around weak implementation.
The European politics of aid. Moore's reason for thinking the window may close. Nativist parties are gaining ground across Europe, from the AfD to Reform UK to the PVV in the Netherlands, and an ageing population will pull more public money homeward. Countries that do not adjust, he warns, may find the external funding gone.
It's 1990. A young staff economist walks into a director's office at the World Bank and says the number he's about to publish is "crazy". The director tells him not to worry about it.
The number was the dollar-a-day poverty line. Lant Pritchett, now of LSE, was that economist. More than three decades later, he's still worrying about it. In this week’s episode he argues that the dollar-a-day line warped how the world thinks about poverty, by setting the bar so low that we can count billions of deprived people as not poor.
In a new paper, co-authored with Martina Viarengo (Graduate Institute, Geneva), their fix isn't to scrap the low line. It's to add a high one as well. They propose a global upper-bound poverty line of $21.50 a day, ten times the extreme-poverty standard, derived from four separate measures of material wellbeing.
Above it, you're no longer poor by any reasonable global standard. Below it, you're poor in a sense worth measuring. By that standard, 99% of Pakistan is poor, and almost no one in Denmark is. Should that affect how we think about anti-poverty policy?
The research behind this episode:
Pritchett, Lant, and Martina Viarengo. Forthcoming. "Raising the Bar: An Inclusive Global Poverty Line." Journal of Development Economics. Available now as a working paper.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Lant Pritchett. 2026. "What the $1-a-day global poverty line gets wrong." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Lant Pritchett is a development economist and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. He worked at the World Bank from 1988 to 2007 and taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades. His work spans economic growth, state capability, education systems, and labour mobility.
The paper is co-authored with Martina Viarengo, Professor of International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research spans public policy, labour markets, comparative education, and international migration.
Research cited in this episode
The dollar-a-day poverty line. Created for the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report on poverty and based on the observation that national poverty lines in the poorest countries clustered at a low floor (Ravallion, Datt and van de Walle 1991). Updated for inflation, it now sits at P$2.15 a day in 2017 purchasing power parity. It was only ever meant to mark the lowest a global poverty line could plausibly be, not the line.
The focus axiom. A standard property of poverty measures, originating with Amartya Sen (1976), under which changes in the income of anyone above the poverty line do not register in the measure. Pritchett's objection is that this assigns mathematically zero weight to the near-poor; a household just above the line counts the same as a Danish millionaire, namely zero. He calls it an economic bug that became a political feature, because it takes global redistribution off the table.
Gresham's law applied to poverty. Pritchett's framing for how the simple headcount displaced richer, distribution-sensitive approaches; bad economics drove out better economics because it was easier to understand. He notes the World Bank of the 1970s was preoccupied with distribution, citing Hollis Chenery and Montek Ahluwalia's Redistribution with Growth (1974), so the idea that economists ignored distribution until poverty measurement arrived is a myth.
The two criteria for an upper bound. The proposed line rests on two ideas drawn from the tension between the focus axiom and standard welfare economics. One, material wellbeing achievement; the line sits where a household reaches a standard of living a rich-country citizen would recognise as adequate. Two, near enough satiation; the line sits where the extra wellbeing from another dollar has fallen so low that treating further gains as zero does little violence to reality. At twenty-one and a half dollars the marginal utility of income is roughly three percent of its value at the dollar-a-day line; at the World Bank's current high line of P$6.85 it is still around thirty percent.
Four measures of wellbeing. The number is triangulated across an iso-elastic utility function, food shares in consumption (Engel's Law), a household index of six basic conditions drawn from Demographic and Health Survey data, and a cross-national index of basics. The estimates cluster between twenty and forty dollars a day; twenty-one and a half was chosen because it is exactly ten times the dollar-a-day line, a focal point in the same way one dollar was.
The six minimal conditions of prosperity. Electricity, improved sanitation, safe water, primary schooling completed by older children, no child dying under five, and no young child malnourished. The test Pritchett applies is whether it would be absurd to call a household prosperous while it lacks one of them.
The rich of the poor and the poor of the rich. The tenth percentile in Denmark has higher consumption than the ninetieth percentile in Pakistan or Indonesia. This is why any global line that produces meaningful poverty in rich countries implies poverty rates near one hundred percent across most of the developing world; a point Dani Rodrik (2007) showed is widely misunderstood.
The prosperity gap. A distribution-sensitive welfare measure adopted by the World Bank (Kraay et al. 2025) that weights the whole income distribution rather than counting everyone above a threshold as zero. Pritchett offers it, alongside poverty-gap and squared-poverty-gap measures at a higher line, as the practical route to acting on a global upper bound without reducing everything to a single headcount.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
Rethinking evidence and refocusing on growth in development economics, Lant Pritchett on what the problem might be if we rely exclusively on rigorous evidence in development economics as a guide for policy.
Rethinking how we measure extreme poverty, Charles Kenny asks: is it time for a new measure of extreme poverty?
Every civil service reform plan opens with the same list of complaints: poor performance, low motivation, weak accountability. Across six African countries and three decades, governments launched 131 separate reform efforts; not one fully achieved what it set out to do.
Martin Williams spent more than a decade working alongside Ghana's civil service before writing a book called Reform as Process that analyses the lessons from his experience, and the rest of the 131 reforms. For example, 34 programmes across six countries tried to link civil service pay to performance; none delivered. One lesson is that formal rules and accountability systems cannot govern what matters in a civil service: innovation, adaptation, co-ordination, the willingness to act on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Meaningful reforms often require no money at all. They require changing expectations from inside, starting small and building credibility, decentralising the leadership of change, and treating new formal rules as a last resort rather than a first step.
The book behind this episode:
Williams, Martin J. 2026. Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies. New York: Columbia University Press. Open-access PDF available at uplopen.com.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Martin J. Williams. 2026. "Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works)." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Martin J. Williams is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His research spans the politics and management of policy implementation, public service delivery, and bureaucratic reform, with a sustained focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He previously worked as an economist in Ghana's Ministry of Trade and Industry as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow, and as a Senior Researcher at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Cape Town. Reform as Process has been shortlisted for the Douglass North Award for best book in institutional and organizational economics.
Research cited in this episode
Non-verifiable tasks. In organizational economics, a verifiable action is one where a third party (an auditor, a judge, an administrative tribunal) can determine objectively whether it was performed correctly. Non-verifiable tasks are those where no such determination can be made; they include innovation, adaptation, co-ordination across teams, and acting on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Williams draws on this framework, which originates in contract theory, to explain why formal accountability systems consistently fall short: they can only govern verifiable outputs, leaving the full range of non-verifiable tasks unaddressed and, in many cases, actively crowded out.
Performance-linked incentive systems. Williams's dataset covers 34 separate reform efforts across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia that attempted to tie civil service pay or progression to measured performance. Not one delivered sustained differentiated incentives on an ongoing basis; only two achieved even partial delivery of rewards, and none delivered sanctions based on measured performance. Williams argues this is not isolated implementation failure but reflects a structural incompatibility between formalised performance metrics and the non-verifiable nature of much civil service work. Managers respond rationally: they set soft targets, award uniform scores, and the process becomes a tick-box exercise.
Projectization of reform. Williams uses this term to describe the dominant approach: treating change as a time-bound, discrete intervention with its own budget, acronym, and implementing team, conceived separately from the organisation's core work. This approach systematically distorts reform goals towards formally measurable outputs (new policies, new laws) rather than sustained behavioural change, undermines credibility by signalling a predetermined end date, and reinforces the perception among civil servants that reform is a temporary performance before things return to normal.
Continuous improvement. Williams draws an analogy with physical fitness: achieving a target and then stopping does not sustain the gain. High-performing organisations, in the public and private sectors alike, treat improvement as an ongoing process embedded in daily work, not a periodic project handed to a specialist unit. Starting small is not an absence of ambition; it is how credibility is built and larger changes become possible. Williams argues civil service reform should be reconceived on these terms, with performance improvement treated as the job of everyone in the organisation.
Decentralised reform leadership. The dominant model of reform leadership, Williams argues, is a visionary leader driving a top-down plan. This model is counterproductive. It personalises reform in ways that guarantee reversal when the leader moves on, and it cannot reach the day-to-day interactions among the thousands of individuals and hundreds of teams that determine how a civil service actually works. A more effective model is catalysing rather than forcing: creating conditions in which teams can identify and solve their own problems, escalate issues, co-ordinate with each other, and act on ideas for improvement without fear of being ignored or penalised.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
How government analytics can improve public sector implementation, in which Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster discuss their efforts to use the data that already exists in governments to better understand how they function.
In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story.
East Asia's post-war growth — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and their neighbours — had lifted millions out of poverty in a generation. The report documented the influence of export subsidies, state-directed credit, land reform, and government-business dialogue. But the bank, constrained by the Washington Consensus of the time, underplayed the industrial policies that were at the heart of this miracle.
Nancy Birdsall was head of the department that produced the report. In this week's VoxDev Talk, she looks back, talking to Tim Phillips about whether this stance affected policy in other developing countries.
Birdsall tells Tim Phillips how the report came to exist at all — financed by the Japanese government as a deliberate strategy to expose the bank's economists to a success story their prevailing framework couldn't explain.
With industrial policy back at the centre of economic debate, Birdsall's new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives asks whether the bank missed its moment to embed those lessons into its operational work.
The research behind this episode:
Birdsall, Nancy. 2025. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 39(4): 127–48. A free download is available at the Center for Global Development.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Nancy Birdsall. 2026. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle." VoxDev Talk (podcast). [Episode URL].
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About Nancy Birdsall
Nancy Birdsall is president emerita of the Center for Global Development, which she co-founded in 2001. She was previously executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and, before that, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, where she oversaw the department responsible for the East Asian Miracle report. Her research spans development finance, inequality, economic growth and the role of multilateral institutions in the global economy.
Research cited in this episode
The East Asian Miracle (World Bank, 1993). A 400-page study of the economic performance of eight high-performing Asian economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — covering the period 1965 to 1990. Commissioned with Japanese government funding, the report documented both market fundamentals and a range of active state policies; its handling of industrial policy was carefully hedged to remain within the bounds of what the bank's dominant Washington Consensus framework could accept. The full report is available from the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository.
The Washington Consensus. A term coined by economist John Williamson in 1989 to describe the package of macroeconomic and structural reforms — fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and market-determined prices — that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury broadly promoted as the framework for development in the late 1980s and 1990s. The consensus was dominant inside the bank during the period the East Asian Miracle report was written; countries following activist state policies did not fit its categories easily.
MITI (Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The Japanese government body responsible for coordinating industrial and trade policy during Japan's post-war growth period, including the direction of credit, protection of infant industries and promotion of heavy manufacturing exports. MITI was widely known inside the bank, but its role in Japan's development was not systematically studied or incorporated into the bank's policy advice until the East Asian Miracle report. It was abolished and reorganised as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2001.
Performance-based credit subsidies. A mechanism used across several East Asian economies in which exporters could access subsidised credit conditional on demonstrating actual export orders. The conditionality — credit only if you are already performing — was central to why the policy worked: it rewarded productive firms and withdrew support from those that failed to deliver. The East Asian Miracle report described this approach in detail without classifying it as industrial policy.
Japan's postal savings system. A government-run savings scheme that channelled household deposits through post offices into state-directed investment, providing below-market returns to savers while funding subsidised credit to targeted sectors. Birdsall notes it as a mechanism worth studying for developing countries seeking to finance industrial support without relying on private capital markets.
Indonesia and the airplane sector. The Indonesian government under Suharto sought to develop a domestic aerospace industry, with state subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). The World Bank's East Asia regional department, which managed the bank's lending relationship with Indonesia, was concerned that the East Asian Miracle report might be read as endorsing this approach. Their pressure to limit the report's treatment of industrial policy is the episode's opening anecdote — and the source of what is possibly the best line in the show.
IDB report on public-private dialogue in Latin America. Birdsall references work by the Inter-American Development Bank on the conditions under which structured dialogue between government bureaucrats and private-sector firms can support industrial policy; she notes that access at the highest levels of government — including the president — appears to be a factor in whether such dialogues produce results.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Industrial policy for economic development, Dani Rodrik on the evidence for active state roles in directing investment and exports, and the institutional prerequisites for making them work.
The future of the World Bank: Why knowledge is power, Penny Goldberg on the bank's role as a producer and broker of development knowledge, and how that function has evolved since the Washington Consensus era.
Related reading on VoxDev
Modern industrial policy: The Asian miracles' blueprint, a VoxDev Talk examining how the principles behind East Asian industrial success — performance conditionality, export orientation, technology learning — can be translated into policy frameworks for today's developing economies.
Where are we in the economics of industrial policies?, what three decades of research have established about when and why industrial policy works, and what conditions determine whether government intervention helps or hinders.
Implementing industrial policy effectively: Lessons from shipbuilding in China, how policy design and performance conditionality determine whether sector-level support produces lasting productivity gains — the same question at the heart of the East Asian Miracle debate.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjXmiaMPabQ
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-perfect-city/id1866874059?i=1000767322240
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MfSc3AWT6lT5jG9kvXW4B?si=371569bc3d374d72
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8902311-the-perfect-city
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/the-perfect-city
What does a perfect city look like in a low- or middle-income country – and how do you get there?
In the closing episode of the Ideas in Development cities series, Ed Glaeser joins Kurtis Lockhart and Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on what makes cities work. He sets out the three foundations every city needs (safety, mobility, education), why infrastructure without the right incentives and institutions fails, what 19th-century New York's cholera outbreaks teach Lusaka about water, why “bus good, train bad” still holds, and what the medieval European city has to offer sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing urban regions.
We also discuss the political art of being a great mayor, why "capacity eats policy as a light afternoon snack", and his three priorities for African cities over the next decade.
Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity?
Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions.
The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear.
Research and references discussed in this episode:
Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan. 2015. "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1): 22–53.
Rana, Annum Ather. 2025. Evidence on the Impact of Microfinance Program on Poverty Reduction and Income Security. Kashf Foundation Focus Note Series, April
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Roshaneh Zafar. 2026. "Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Roshaneh Zafar
Roshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, Pakistan's first specialised microfinance institution. A development economist by training, she worked at the World Bank before leaving to found Kashf in 1996 after training under Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Her work spans microfinance, micro-insurance, women's economic empowerment, low-cost private education and behaviour change communication.
Research and context cited in this episode
Grameen Bank and the Grameen model. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983, Grameen Bank pioneered group-based lending to poor women without requiring collateral, on the premise that social accountability within borrower groups could substitute for asset security. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kashf was established as a Grameen replicator but diverged significantly in its approach: hiring women loan officers from the outset, replacing the group hierarchy with a peer partnership model (using the Urdu term baji, meaning sister, for both client and staff), and adapting products for Pakistan's religious, linguistic and cultural diversity.
The 2008 microfinance delinquency crisis in Pakistan. Over-indebtedness, predatory lending practices and the absence of a credit information bureau led to a sector-wide delinquency crisis in Pakistan in 2008. Following the crisis, regulators, lenders and the Pakistan Microfinance Network introduced enhanced consumer protection standards and a credit bureau to prevent multiple borrowing. Kashf now limits lending to clients with no more than two active loans from any provider.
Banerjee et al. (2015) randomised controlled trial. The paper, a randomised evaluation of a microcredit expansion in Hyderabad, India by Spandana Sphoorty, found no statistically significant effect on women's empowerment, health, education or consumption over an 18-to-24-month follow-up period. It became the most-cited challenge to microfinance's development impact. Zafar's counter-argument turns on time horizon: empowerment, she argues, is a decade-scale process that short-panel RCTs cannot capture. A University of Minnesota longitudinal analysis of ten years of Kashf client data found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of loans taken and business income, and between savings behaviour and subsequent business investment.
Behaviour change communication: theater and television. Kashf has used street theater for thirty years to communicate on topics including child marriage, girls' education, reproductive health and insurance take-up. After Zafar attended a conference session on the impact of telenovelas on gender norms in Brazil and Mexico, the foundation moved into television drama production, covering topics including child sexual abuse, human trafficking and cybercrime. A child sexual abuse drama prompted a legal notice from PEMRA (the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority), which was successfully contested. The dramas are produced with a media and creative team to ensure sensitive handling of difficult subjects.
The gender bond and gender sukuk. In 2005, Zafar rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The experience prompted a long-term ambition to connect micro women entrepreneurs to capital markets. Kashf subsequently issued a gender bond listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, followed by a gender sukuk (Sharia-compliant bond) listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — the first such instrument linking Pakistani microfinance to international Islamic capital markets.
Low-cost private schools. Research by Kashf found that clients, once they had access to income, were moving their children from public to low-cost private schools; teacher absenteeism in private schools was far lower. Further research showed 70% of these schools were run by women. Kashf began financing them; it now supports over 3,000 such schools, with a requirement that girls constitute at least 50% of enrolment.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Breaking down access constraints faced by women: Experimental evidence from Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how removing specific barriers to vocational training take-up shifts economic participation among women in Pakistan — the supply-side complement to Kashf's demand-side model.
How safe transport could unlock women's labour force participation in Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how mobility constraints suppress women's economic activity in urban Pakistan, and how subsidised women-only transport services can shift that.
Related reading on VoxDev
What have we learned about microfinance?, a VoxDev article reviewing the evidence base on microfinance impact, including the conditions under which credit does and does not produce lasting change in household welfare.
Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, a VoxDev article on evidence that participation in group lending schemes produces political voice and civic engagement even when economic empowerment effects are limited.
Empowering women through digital financial services, a VoxDev article on how mobile money and digital accounts give women a private, named financial identity — and what that does to their control over household resources.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOPG6UmOHGU
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs/id1866874059?i=1000766172534
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BoYX7rfpjn86KndCxsnyd?si=53213815c1fd4408
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8899287-cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/leonard-wantchekon-youth-governance-and-africas-urban-future
Are African cities a powder keg of restless youth – or the most promising place to build prosperity, peaceful politics and shared civic life?
Leonard Wantchekon joins Ideas in Development to argue that African cities should be seen as a youth opportunity, not a youth problem.
We discuss recent unrest in Kenya and Tanzania, his work showing that clientelism is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.
Between 1959 and 1961, between thirty and forty million people starved to death in China. The Great Famine had many causes, and one of them was a campaign to eradicate sparrows.
Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago tells Tim Phillips about Mao Zedong's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which led to the mass killing of sparrows, set off a chain of consequences that scientists had warned about, but political pressure had silenced. Sparrows eat crops, but they also eat the locusts and other insects that destroy the crops. Remove the sparrows and the pests go unchecked. Wang and his co-authors estimate the eradication cut national grain yields by 8-9%, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total agricultural decline during the famine.
The research behind this episode:
Frank, Eyal G., Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You. 2024. "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China." NBER Working Paper 34087.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Shaoda Wang. 2025. "How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.” VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Shaoda Wang
Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. His research spans environmental economics, political economy and development, with a focus on how state capacity and political incentives shape environmental and health outcomes in China and other developing countries.
Research cited in this episode
The Four Pests Campaign (1958). Launched as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the grounds that they ate grain and reduced agricultural yields. Several prominent Chinese scientists warned at the time that removing sparrows would destabilise the food chain by eliminating a key predator of crop pests, particularly locusts. Their advice was ignored. The campaign resulted in the killing of an estimated two billion sparrows.
County gazetteers as a data source. Official harvest data reported by local governments to the central government during the Great Leap Forward was heavily inflated; local officials faced strong political incentives to overstate output, and those exaggerated figures contributed to the famine by masking food shortages from central planners. Wang and his co-authors instead use county gazetteers: records compiled by local elites through a bottom-up process with no link to the political reward structures that distorted official reporting. Comparison between the two sources reveals the scale of over-reporting in the official data.
Sparrow habitat suitability index. Rather than relying on reported sparrow kill counts, which were distorted by local officials seeking to demonstrate compliance with campaign targets, the paper constructs an index of how suitable each county's climate and ecological conditions are for sparrow habitation. Counties with high sparrow suitability were more exposed to the shock of eradication; comparing their crop yield and mortality trajectories against low-suitability counties before and after the campaign provides the causal identification strategy. The two groups followed similar trajectories before the campaign; divergence afterwards is attributed to the eradication.
State food procurement as a famine amplifier. The Great Famine was not simply a production shortfall. The central government continued to export food during the famine years because inflated harvest reports gave it no signal of the actual crisis. State procurement quotas extracted grain from rural communities at a time when households were already facing starvation; the political system that caused the sparrow eradication was also the mechanism that amplified its consequences.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
The economics of ecosystems: How nature and economies interact. Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago — a co-author of the sparrows paper — on how to measure the economic value of biodiversity. His research on bats and white-nose syndrome, and on desert locusts, shows what happens when natural pest control collapses; the sparrows episode is the historical counterpart.
Related reading on VoxDev
The political economy of policy learning: Evidence from China, a VoxDev article on how misaligned incentives across China's political hierarchy distort policy experimentation and produce systematically exaggerated signals — the same dynamic that inflated both the sparrow kill counts and the harvest figures during the Great Leap Forward.
Autocratic rule and social capital: Evidence from Imperial China, a VoxDev article on the long-run effects of political persecution under autocratic rule in China, and how the suppression of dissent shapes economic and social behaviour across generations.
The economics of conservation in low- and middle-income countries, a VoxDev article surveying the evidence on maintaining natural ecosystems, the role of governance, and the costs of losing species whose economic value is not yet understood.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKF3aJ96L2o
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How does organised crime take over a city – and can mayors act before it does?
Chris Blattman, economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, joins the Ideas in Development cities series to explain how street gangs evolve into powerful criminal confederations, why cities like Medellín can have low homicide rates and still be almost completely captured, and what the "terrible trade-off" between violence, criminal power and political corruption means for policymakers.
We then discuss the perils faced by fast-growing African cities, where the conditions for organised crime to take root are quietly assembling.
Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/
Decades of agricultural development policy have chased yield. Bigger harvests, better seeds, more fertiliser. But how can we make farming more profitable?
Craig McIntosh of UC San Diego is academic lead on a J-PAL Policy Insight covering twenty-three randomised evaluations of credit and grants for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. He tell Tim Phillips that although yields and revenues often rise, profit rarely responds in the same way. When farmers are already running their farms close to the margin, costs rise at the same rate as income, and the household bank balance does not move much. What can we bundle with credit to change that situation?
The research behind this episode:
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Can relaxing credit constraints boost farmers' profits?” J-PAL Policy Insights. Last modified February 2026. Academic leads: Craig McIntosh and Tavneet Suri; insight authors: Leonie Rauls and Rebecca Toole.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Craig McIntosh. 2026. “Boosting farmers' profits?" VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Craig McIntosh is Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. His research spans development finance, agricultural credit, cash transfer design and the evaluation of large-scale anti-poverty interventions.
Research cited in this episode
Microcredit take-up among farmers. Across four randomised evaluations of traditional microcredit aimed at farmers, in Morocco, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Malawi, take-up sat between 13 and 33 percent. Standard microcredit repayment begins a week or two after disbursement, which is incompatible with a crop cycle that pays out cash once or twice a year. Group liability also breaks down in agriculture, where shocks like drought or floods hit borrowers together rather than one at a time.
Tailoring credit to the agricultural cycle. Restructured loans push take-up much higher. Nakano and Magezi in Tanzania allowed rice farmers to defer 80 percent of repayment until harvest; 39 percent borrowed and over 92 percent repaid. William Jack and co-authors in Kenya offered dairy farmers asset-collateralised loans for a water tank; take-up reached 44 percent against 2.4 percent for a typical joint-liability product. Lambon-Quayefio, Manjeer and Udry in Ghana offered digital credit with a three-month grace period; 59 percent of farmers took it up.
Sell low, buy high. Burke and co-authors in Kenya showed that smallholders routinely sell at the post-harvest price trough and buy back grain at hungry-season prices 20 to 40 percent higher. Harvest-time loans that allowed farmers to delay sales had take-up of 64 percent and produced returns around 29 percent for borrowers. Treated villages also saw flatter price trajectories, generating spillover benefits for non-borrowers.
Lean-season credit. Fink, Jack and Masiye in Zambia found that lean-season loans let farmers stop hiring out their labour and instead work their own land. Output rose by 9 percent. Loan repayments were comparable to the gain, leaving farmers roughly even on profits.
Selection into credit markets. Beaman, Karlan, Thuysbaert and Udry in Mali first offered loans, then offered grants to those who had refused. Returns to capital among would-be borrowers were on the order of 130 percent. Returns among those who had refused the loan were close to zero. Credit appears to self-target toward farmers who can use it productively, which is regressive in welfare terms and also exactly what a capital-scarce economy needs credit markets to do.
Input subsidy programmes (ISPs). Jayne and co-authors reviewed eighty studies of fertiliser subsidies across sub-Saharan Africa. Yields rise while subsidies are in place; profitability is mixed; targeting is frequently politically distorted, often skewed toward better-connected or wealthier farmers. The standout randomised exception is Carter, Laajaj and Yang in Mozambique, where two-thirds of recipients had never used fertiliser before; the programme produced sustained gains and a high benefit-cost ratio. By contrast, Gignoux and co-authors in Haiti found a fertiliser-voucher subsidy crowded out farmers' own input spending and lowered yields once the subsidy ended.
Cash transfers and diversification. In six studies measuring both farm and non-farm outcomes, three found households doubled down on agriculture and three saw movement into non-farm enterprises. The Zambian Child Grant evaluation by Handa and co-authors saw women invest in seeds, fertiliser and livestock and start non-farm businesses, with household income roughly doubling.
Bundled input programmes. Four randomised evaluations bundled credit or a grant with information, training or market access. All four lifted revenues; three of the four lifted incomes or profits. Harou and co-authors in Tanzania showed that fertiliser vouchers alone and soil testing alone did nothing; only the combination raised yields and revenues. Ashraf, Gine and Karlan's Kenya study on French-bean and baby-corn export found credit increased programme participation from 27 to 41 percent, even where it did not further raise income among participants.
In 2017, Argentina had the highest corporate income tax rate in Latin America. Reducing it was politically popular and economically desirable. Getting it through a Congress where the governing coalition held just 19% of Senate seats, while the fiscal deficit ran at close to 8% of GDP, was a harder problem. A package of reforms was planned, revenue-neutral and phased over five years: corporate tax on reinvested profits would fall from 35% to 25%; a minimum-wage deduction would reduce the payroll tax burden on firms employing informal workers; energy, alcohol, and sugar taxes would be reorganised on rational, emissions-based principles; and provincial governments would agree to phase out the cascading "ingresos brutos" sales tax in exchange for limits on public spending.
In this week’s VoxDev Talk, Sebastian Galiani, who served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina and led the design of the reform, tells Tim Phillips how the Macri government attempted to reform its tax structure, and what it teaches us about policy. Credibility, he says, was the biggest constraint: in a country as economically volatile as Argentina, what matters is not only what the law says, but whether investors believe it will survive a change of government.
The research behind this episode:
Afonso, Santiago, and Sebastian Galiani. 2025. "Motives and Constraints in the Implementation of Argentina's 2017 Tax Reform." NBER Working Paper 34442.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Galiani. 2026. "Argentina's 2017 tax reform." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).
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About the guest
Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. His research spanning political economy, public finance, and Latin American development has examined how institutions, property rights, and fiscal policy shape economic outcomes. He served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina in 2017, where he led the design of the tax reform he examines in this episode.
Research cited in this episode
Ingresos brutos is a cascading sales tax levied by Argentina's provincial governments, applied each time a good changes hands along the supply chain. Unlike a value-added tax, it allows no deduction for taxes already paid at earlier stages; the burden compounds with the length of the production chain, making it particularly punishing for manufactured goods that pass through many hands. Galiani's team negotiated a deal under which the provinces agreed to phase this system out over five years and move toward a simpler, less distortive sales tax structure.
Second-best reform is the practice of improving a policy system as far as constraints allow rather than designing for the theoretically optimal outcome that cannot be achieved in practice. Galiani frames the 2017 reform explicitly in these terms: the design team mapped the distance between Argentina's actual tax system and optimal taxation, then asked how far they could move in that direction given the fiscal, political, and negotiating constraints they faced. The result departed from the ideal in every dimension; it was nonetheless a genuine improvement on what existed before.
Escape clauses are provisions written into legislation that suspend or modify specific commitments if defined trigger conditions are met. The 2017 reform included several: the inflation adjustment for the calculation of corporate assets, for example, would apply only if inflation continued to fall. Galiani describes escape clauses as essential when designing policy in high-volatility environments where external shocks are not exceptional events but a predictable feature of the landscape.
Related reading on VoxDev
How should economic researchers give policy advice? Stefan Dercon argues that giving second-best advice, taking into account what is politically achievable rather than what is theoretically optimal, often produces better outcomes than the standard model of advocating for the ideal and waiting.
How progressive taxation affects tax compliance in developing countries. Reforms that boost progressivity and are effectively communicated can yield higher compliance alongside greater fairness; evidence that the design and communication of a reform matter as much as its content.
Improving payroll-tax compliance through decentralised monitoring: Evidence from Mexico. Evidence that even formal firms evade payroll taxes, and that giving workers the right incentives to monitor their employers' wage reporting can substantially improve compliance; relevant context for Argentina's effort to reduce the payroll tax burden on unskilled workers.
At the start of every planting season, smallholder farmers needs seeds and fertiliser, but the income from the harvest that would pay for them is many months away. With no credit history and no collateral, banks aren’t going to give credit to farmers.They cope by selling livestock, pledging part of the harvest to a trader at a discount, or turning to neighbours.
Can we do a better job of lending to farmers? Monica Lambon-Quayefio of the University of Ghana tells Tim Phillips about a digital lending product for farmers in southern Ghana shows what this approach can do — but also where it still falls short. Working with Farmerline, a social enterprise that scores creditworthiness from farm and sales data rather than formal records, the trial randomly assigned eligible applicants to receive input loans worth around $40. Farm input expenditures rose by around 11%. But not profits. Find out why in this week’s episode.
The research behind this episode:
Karlan, Dean, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry. 2026. "Access to Digital Credit for Smallholder Farmers: Experimental Evidence from Ghana." Journal of Development Economics 181.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Monica Lambon-Quayefio. 2026. "Can digital credit unlock investment in smallholder farms?" VoxDev Talk
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About Monica Lambon-Quayefio
Monica Lambon-Quayefio is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, where her research focuses on social protection, agricultural technology, and experimental methods in development economics. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Dean Karlan, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry, all of Northwestern University.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what Ghana's experience with mobile money reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what it takes for digital finance to reach the very poor.
What have we learned about microfinance?: What decades of research have established, where the evidence remains contested, and what the most important open questions are for policymakers thinking about expanding access to credit in low-income settings.
Related reading on VoxDev
The impact of digital credit in low-income countries: an overview of the evidence on how digital lending products affect borrowers, including the risks of overborrowing and the conditions under which short-term digital credit translates into improved economic outcomes.
How to boost digital banking adoption and savings in Ghana: evidence on what drives uptake of digital financial services among low-income households in Ghana, and what works when trying to shift behaviour away from informal savings arrangements.
Rich people live longer than poor people in every country that researchers have studied. In the United States today, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1% of individuals exceeds ten years. The relationship between money and health is steepest at the bottom of the income distribution, where additional resources buy the most: when people are poor, there is a great deal that money can do for their health.
In this week’s episode, Adriana Lleras-Muney of UCLA tells Tim Phillips that the evidence on the relationship between poverty and health is less certain than policymakers tend to assume. Causality runs in both directions: poor health is one of the fastest routes into poverty, and understanding how much of the association flows in each direction is still an active debate. Giving poor people more money does not reliably translate into better health within the timescales and amounts that most experiments can test, because the details matter: how long the transfer lasts, whether it is conditional, and what receiving it signals about a person's economic future all shape what they actually do with it.
The most consistent finding from the policy evidence is that public health insurance and access to cheap, proven preventive interventions tend to deliver more reliable health gains than cash transfers — but whether either works in practice depends heavily on the implementation and the trust that governments can build with the populations they are trying to help.
The research behind this episode:
Lleras-Muney, Adriana, Hannes Schwandt, and Laura R. Wherry. 2025. "Poverty and Health." Annual Review of Economics 17.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2026. "Poverty and Health." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Adriana Lleras-Muney
Adriana Lleras-Muney is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research focuses on health economics and the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and health outcomes across the life course. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University) and Laura R. Wherry (NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service).
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
The history of cash transfers: Tim Phillips speaks with Ugo Gentilini about his research tracing 2,500 years of giving people money, from Ancient Rome to the COVID pandemic, and what history reveals about the recurring debates over when and why cash transfers work.
Improving access to and use of clean water: Tim Phillips speaks with Pascaline Dupas about why access to clean water remains one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available, and the barriers that prevent its wider adoption in low-income settings.
Related reading on VoxDev
Cash transfers reduce adult and child mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries: evidence that unconditional cash transfers have measurable effects on mortality in poor settings, with implications for how we think about the relationship between income and health.
Effective health aid: Evidence from Gavi's vaccine programme: what a large-scale vaccination programme reveals about the conditions under which targeted public health interventions can make a lasting difference in low-income countries.
Eighty years after Indian independence, the economic fingerprint of British colonial rule is still visible at the district level. Two institutions in particular left scars: whether a district was governed directly by British administrators or by one of India's roughly 680 Indian princes, and what kind of land tax arrangement the British put in place. For example, by 1991, directly ruled districts had nine percentage points fewer middle schools and a 20-percentage-point lower probability of having a road than areas under indirect rule. The question was whether those gaps would eventually close.
Lakshmi Iyer of the University of Notre Dame tells Tim Phillips that by 2011 infrastructure gaps had closed completely. Targeted post-independence programmes, including the Minimum Needs Program of the 1970s and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of 2001, pushed schools, health centres, and roads towards underserved districts. The picture for land tenure is mixed. Areas that historically had landlord-based systems are still 17% behind non-landlord areas in wheat yields, and the gap in fertiliser use has widened rather than narrowed. One reason, the policy response was a universal subsidy rather than being specifically aimed at places that had fallen behind.
So colonial legacies can be erased, but only by policies designed to reach the places that were left behind. When policies have equalisation built in, historical gaps disappear. When they do not, the gaps persist.
The research behind this episode:
Iyer, Lakshmi and Coleson Weir. 2025. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" Journal of Development Economics 177.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Lakshmi Iyer. 2026. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Lakshmi Iyer
Lakshmi Iyer is Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at CEPR. Her research focuses on political economy, governance, and the long-run effects of historical institutions in developing countries. The paper discussed in this episode extends two of her earlier papers, one co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee and one sole-authored, both of which are listed in the research cited section below.
Research cited in this episode
Iyer, Lakshmi. 2010. "Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences." Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4). The original paper documenting that areas brought under direct British rule had significantly lower access to schools, health centres, and roads in the post-colonial period, using Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse as an instrument for the selectivity of British annexation.
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. "History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India." American Economic Review 95 (4). Finds that districts where the British assigned proprietary rights in land to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investment and productivity in the post-independence period than areas where rights went to individual cultivators.
Nunn, Nathan. 2007. "Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment." Journal of Development Economics 83 (1). Develops the theoretical case for why economies displaced into a low-production equilibrium by extraction or oppression can remain there long after the original impetus disappears.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
India's economic development since independence: Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian discuss how India's transformation across eight decades of independence has defied conventional models of development, and what it reveals about the relationship between political economy and growth.
Related reading on VoxDev
Drawing the line: The short- and long-term consequences of partitioning India: examines the economic and political legacy of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, and how a boundary drawn in the final weeks of empire continues to shape outcomes on both sides.
Historical legacies and African development: surveys the evidence on how pre-colonial political organisation, colonial-era institutions, and the slave trade have shaped the long-run economic geography of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find the entire AI series.
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What happens to a growth model built on services when AI can do some of those services itself?
Raghuram Rajan joins Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss how India's economy grew through services exports, why that model may be more resilient to AI than critics assume, and what policymakers need to get right on human capital, universities, and digital access to stay ahead.
China became the world's largest bilateral creditor to developing countries over two decades, and for most of that time the scale of what it was doing was effectively a state secret. Its state-owned banks lent close to $1 trillion to developing-country governments, structured roughly half those loans against commodity export revenues held in offshore accounts, and concentrated the riskiest lending in countries such as Venezuela, Angola, and Russia. Net financial flows turned negative in 2019, and the countries that borrowed now repay more to China than they receive in new lending.
Sebastian Horn of the Kiel Institute tells Tim Phillips that despite the opacity and the distinctive collateral structures, we’ve seen this movie before, in the 1920s and 1980s: in the bust, serial short-term extensions of grace periods that defer payments without resolving the underlying debt, while affected countries cut spending to stay current. What Horn calls a "silent crisis" is underway in a cluster of highly indebted developing countries, too small to trigger global contagion but large enough to matter profoundly for the people living through it.
The challenge is whether China's lenders, debtor governments, and the broader international financial architecture can coordinate the kind of relief that will make a difference.
The research behind this episode:
Horn, Sebastian, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch. 2025. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." Journal of Economic Perspectives 39 (4).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Horn. 2026. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Sebastian Horn
Sebastian Horn is a professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and at the University of Hamburg, where his research focuses on international finance, sovereign debt, and China's role as a global creditor.
Research cited in this episode
AidData. 2021. AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0. AidData, William & Mary. A comprehensive public dataset tracing Chinese government-backed lending and grants to 165 countries between 2000 and 2017, built from embassy records, parliamentary gazettes, central bank reports, and news sources. Much of the quantitative evidence in the episode depends on it, since China has never published a consolidated balance sheet of its overseas lending.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Is debt leading to the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources?: Tim Phillips speaks with Pushpam Kumar about how sovereign debt obligations shape governments' incentives to extract natural resources more intensively, and what that means for the long-run sustainability of resource-dependent developing economies.
Related reading on VoxDev
Navigating Senegal's unexpected debt crisis: how a country widely regarded as a model of fiscal prudence found itself in acute debt distress, and what the episode reveals about the vulnerabilities facing developing-country borrowers in the current environment.
Chinese development finance and public opinion: evidence on how Chinese-funded infrastructure projects affect attitudes towards China in recipient countries, with implications for understanding the political economy of China's overseas lending strategy.
Between 2019 and 2023, the number of electronic transactions tripled in six Latin American economies. The share of adults using digital wallets, mobile money, and mobile bank accounts went from 3% in 2011 to 40% by 2021. A region that not long ago was defined by financial disasters, hyperinflation, and deep mistrust of banks has become one of the world's leading examples of how digital payments can transform an economy.
Diego Vera-Cossio edited Beyond Cash, The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Inter-American Development Bank's new regional microeconomic report on digital payments. He tells Tim Phillips how the effects of this revolution are more profound that freeing people from the need to carry cash. In Santiago, bus robberies fell when drivers stopped handling cash. In Brazil, firms in the most cash-intensive sectors grew substantially after the instant payment system Pix launched. In Colombia, people without any credit history started borrowing formally after being nudged to receive their social program payments digitally. And in Bolivia, where 80% of the workforce is informal, people are scanning QR codes at street market stalls.
The question Diego, his colleagues, and policymakers int he region and beyond, are now trying to answer is how to build on all of that, and how to make it stick.
The research behind this episode:
Vera-Cossio, Diego A., ed. 2025. Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin American and Caribbean Microeconomic Report. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Vera-Cossio, Diego A. 2026. "Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Diego Vera-Cossio
Diego A. Vera-Cossio is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he works on social protection, financial inclusion, digital payments, and the design of public programmes in Latin America. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Research cited in this episode
Dominguez, Patricio. 2022. "Victim Incentives and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Bus Driver Robberies in Chile." Review of Economics and Statistics 104 (5). Exploits the reform that removed cash from Santiago buses to show that eliminating the cash target reduces robbery rates. The bus driver no longer carries anything worth taking.
Vera-Cossio, Diego A., Bridget Hoffman, Camilo Pecha, and Carla Hernandez. 2024. "Does Adopting Digital Payment for Cash Transfers Improve the Financial Inclusion and Financial Well-Being of Low-Income Households?" IDB Research Insights. A randomised experiment in Colombia: unbanked beneficiaries of a social transfer programme were randomly encouraged to receive payments into digital wallets. Those who switched had fewer failed payment attempts, could check their balance without internet access via SIM, and were more likely to take out a formal loan for the first time.
Inter-American Development Bank. 2024. Fintech Ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean Exceeds 3,000 Startups. Survey counts of fintech companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Found roughly 700 fintechs in the region in 2017 and more than 3,000 by 2023, with 20% of them offering payment-related products.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what the Ghanaian mobile money experience reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what that means for how mobile money can serve the very poor.
Mobile money markets and financial inclusion in Africa: Nicola Limodio discusses what happened when mobile money operators in Africa were required to make their platforms interoperable, lowering fees but also reducing rural coverage. A direct parallel to the interoperability debate in Latin America.
Related reading on VoxDev
Digital financial services go a long way: Evidence from Mexico: evidence on how expanding digital payments and digital financial services affects spending, savings, and economic outcomes in a large middle-income country.
The wide-ranging benefits of fostering financial inclusion in Mexico: on how policies that bring people into the formal financial system in Mexico produce benefits that extend well beyond the financial sector itself.
VoxDevLit: Mobile Money: a curated literature review covering what research has established about mobile money, financial inclusion, and economic outcomes, useful for anyone who wants a broader picture of the evidence base behind the episode.
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find the entire AI series.
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Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
In this episode, Josh Lerner joined Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss how technology diffuses around the world, touching on the role of venture capital, universities and China.
We then cover what this means for the diffusion of AI, and what can be done to speed up diffusion.
For 70 years, a simple idea has shaped efforts to reduce prejudice: put people from different groups together under the right conditions, and contact reduces prejudice. Gordon Allport proposed it in 1954. A landmark 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies seemed to confirm it, reporting an average effect of 0.4 standard deviations on prejudice measures. That paper has been cited more than 14,000 times. The credibility revolution has undermined this evidence, by correcting for publication bias that meant null results were seldom published.
Matt Lowe of the Vancouver School of Economics has published a new review of 41 pre-registered studies, and he finds the average effect is one-tenth of a standard deviation. Those 41 pre-registered intergroup contact experiments cover nearly 40,000 participants across a wide range of countries, roughly half of them in the Global South. He tells Tim Phillips that the effects are real, consistently positive … but consistently small.
Contact interventions are a waste of time. Costs can be low, and the alternatives have not yet been held to the same rigorous standard. But the gap between what the old literature promised and what careful experiments deliver is large enough to matter for anyone designing programmes to reduce prejudice between groups.
The research behind this episode:
Lowe, Matt. 2025. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" Annual Review of Economics 17.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Matt Lowe
Matt Lowe is an assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, and a J-PAL faculty affiliate whose research spans intergroup relations, development, and political economy. His website is at mattjlowe.github.io. He has previously been published in VoxDev discussing his field experiment on collaborative and adversarial caste integration through cricket leagues in India.
Research cited in this episode
Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley. The founding text of intergroup contact theory, which proposed that contact between groups reduces prejudice when it meets four conditions: equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support from authorities.
Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2006. "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (5). The 515-study meta-analysis that established the 0.4 standard deviation benchmark for contact effects and became the dominant reference point for the field.
Paluck, Elizabeth Levy, Roni Porat, Chelsey S. Clark, and Donald P. Green. 2021. "Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges." Annual Review of Psychology 72. A review of 418 experiments on prejudice reduction from 2007 to 2019, identifying troubling signs of publication bias and finding that most studies evaluate light-touch, small-scale interventions with uncertain long-term effects.
Scacco, Alexandra, and Shana S. Warren. 2018. "Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria." American Political Science Review 112 (3). A randomised field experiment mixing Christian and Muslim young men in a vocational training programme in Kaduna, Nigeria. Contact reduced discriminatory behaviour but did not change attitudes.
Mousa, Salma. 2020. "Building Social Cohesion between Christians and Muslims through Soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq." Science 369 (6505). Randomly assigned Iraqi Christian displaced persons to football teams with Muslim teammates. Effects were positive on behaviours within the intervention but did not generalise to interactions with Muslim strangers outside it.
Chakraborty, Anujit, Arkadev Ghosh, Matt Lowe, and Gareth Nellis. 2024. "Learning About Outgroups: The Impact of Broad Versus Deep Interactions." SSRN Working Paper. A field experiment in India finding that broad contact (meeting many different outgroup members) corrects misperceptions about outgroups, while deep contact (sustained interaction with one person) builds social and economic ties. Neither type generalises fully to the wider outgroup.
Lowe, Matt. 2021. "Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration." American Economic Review 111 (6). Randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to cricket teams or control groups, finding that collaborative contact increased cross-caste friendships and efficiency in trade while adversarial contact reduced them.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Promoting national integration in Nigeria: Tim Phillips talks to Oyebola Okunogbe about her research on the Nigerian National Youth Service Corps, which posts university graduates to states other than their own to promote national integration through intergroup contact.
Peacemaking, peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction: Salma Mousa and Lisa Hultman discuss what the evidence shows about building peace and social cohesion after conflict, including which interventions hold up and which do not.
Building social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools: an intervention in Turkey: Sule Alan discusses a programme designed to build cohesion between children from different ethnic backgrounds in Turkish schools, with effects on peer violence, reciprocity, and interethnic friendships.
Related reading on VoxDev
How competition between villages helped divided communities in Indonesia: in ethnically diverse or divided settings, shared efforts towards a collective external goal can help bridge internal divides and build a shared identity.
Reducing prejudice towards forced migrants through perspective taking: evidence on how perspective-taking interventions affect attitudes towards refugees and displaced populations.
How a documentary film fostered interethnic harmony in Bangladesh: a media-based approach to reducing intergroup prejudice, examining what content and delivery can shift attitudes at scale.
In cities across low- and middle-income countries, traffic crawls 24 hours a day. In Dhaka during rush hour, speeds average around 15km/h. At three in the morning, when the roads are empty, they average about 20km/h. Urban transport in the developing world is not only slow because of congestion. And so congestion policy, Adam Storeygard of Tufts University argues, gets you a small fraction of the way to solving the problems of urban transport in LMICs.
That counterintuitive finding is one many themes in Storeygard's wide-ranging review of what research actually tells us about how people in LMICs get from A to B. From informal minibuses to bus rapid transit, from a field experiment in Bangalore that tested congestion pricing to the long shadow of colonial railroads still shaping African trade today, the picture that emerges is more nuanced and more interesting than many policy blueprints suggest. He tells Tim Phillips what the evidence supports, where it runs out, and why fixing the roads won’t fix everything.
The research behind this episode:
Storeygard, Adam. 2025. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." NBER Working Paper 34354. Forthcoming in a special issue of Regional Science and Urban Economics.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Adam Storeygard
Adam Storeygard is Professor of Economics at Tufts University, where his research focuses on urbanisation, transportation, and the economic geography of the developing world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his work uses geographic and satellite data to study how infrastructure shapes where people live, how they move, and how economies develop.
Research cited in this episode
Akbar, Prottoy Aman, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard. 2023. "The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich and Poor Countries." NBER Working Paper 31642. The paper behind the Dhaka finding: assembling travel speed data across 1,200 cities in 152 countries, the authors show that cities in poor countries are roughly half as fast as those in rich countries, and that most of the gap is not congestion but structural low speeds in the absence of traffic.
Björkegren, Daniel, Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis. 2025. "Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos." Working paper. When Lagos introduced a major new public bus system, informal drivers on affected routes left, so bus frequency on those routes fell on net. The big benefit accrued to other routes that informal drivers switched to, where prices and waiting times fell. Winners and losers, not a clean gain.
Franklin, Simon. 2018. "Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies." Economic Journal 128 (614). A randomised trial in Addis Ababa: providing transport subsidies to unemployed young people helped them search for and find formal jobs. Effects did not persist once subsidies ended, raising questions about how much the transport constraint itself was the binding one.
Borker, Girija. 2021. "Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9731. Women in Delhi attend less selective colleges than male peers with identical academic credentials, not because they are not admitted, but because of perceived harassment risk during the commute. Delhi university students overwhelmingly live with their parents, and the daily journey matters as much as the institution.
Kreindler, Gabriel. 2024. "Peak-Hour Road Congestion Pricing: Experimental Evidence and Equilibrium Implications." Econometrica 92 (4). A field experiment in Bangalore, paying drivers to avoid congested areas and times. The finding: congestion pricing would produce only modest benefits in Bangalore because traffic density has a relatively moderate impact on speed there, meaning you would have to charge astronomically high prices to shift behaviour significantly.
Jedwab, Remi, and Adam Storeygard. 2022. "The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010." Journal of the European Economic Association 20 (1). Shows how transportation infrastructure investments, including the legacy of colonial railroads built primarily to connect mines to ports, continue to shape where Africans live and how countries trade, with consequences that push African economies toward overseas rather than intra-regional commerce.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Michelson, Hope, 2026, “African agriculture's underappreciated supply side.” VoxDev Talk. How transport links are one of the many impediments that stop rural farmers from making the most of the opportunities of better agricultural inputs.
Related reading on VoxDev
"Urban transport infrastructure in developing countries”, the VoxDevLit review of research on urban transport in LMICs, covering buses, BRT, subways, and informal transit networks.
"Who wins when public transit challenges private transit?”, the Lagos bus reform discussed in this episode, with further detail on how informal drivers responded to new public routes.
"Perceived risk of street harassment and college choice of women in Delhi”, Girija Borker's research on how commute safety shapes women's educational choices, as discussed by Storeygard in this episode.
"The equitable benefits of Colombia's bus rapid transit system”, complements the discussion of BRT in Bogota, one of Storeygard's three best-evidenced cases for BRT benefits.
Particulate matter is, Michael Greenstone argues, the greatest public health threat on the planet. Worse than HIV, cigarettes, and alcohol. The average person loses about two years of life expectancy to it. In India, the figure is three and a half years. The solution to this problem has been tested, and it works, at least in high-income countries.
Greenstone and his co-authors ran a randomised controlled trial in Surat, Gujarat: from 300 industrial plants, mostly making textiles, all burning coal, half were randomly assigned to a market where pollution permits could be bought and sold. The results: in the market, pollution fell 25%, compliance was near-perfect, and abatement costs dropped 12%. The cost-benefit ratio is as high as 200 to one. Many plants in the control group asked to be moved into the market.
The research behind this episode:
Greenstone, Michael, Rohini Pande, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan. 2025. "Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India." Quarterly Journal of Economics 140 (2): 1003–1060. An ungated version is available as BFI Working Paper 2025-53.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim. 2025. "Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Michael Greenstone
Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is the founding Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC) and the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. His research focuses on the costs and benefits of environmental quality, including the Air Quality Life Index, which tracks the toll of particulate pollution country by country. He previously served as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.
Research cited in this episode
Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. The source of the life-expectancy statistics used in this episode: particulate pollution costs the average person on Earth roughly two years of life expectancy, with India averaging three and a half years. The index tracks this burden country by country, city by city.
The US sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade programme, established under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, was the canonical precedent Greenstone cited: a market that dramatically reduced acid rain in the eastern United States at costs far below pre-programme projections. He noted that the UK and EU have since built comparable CO2 markets. All have worked well. The question this experiment addressed was whether the same logic held in the developing world, where almost all the pollution now is.
Emissions Market Accelerator. An independent scale-up organisation founded by Greenstone and colleagues to replicate the Gujarat model beyond the original research setting. Current pipeline: a statewide sulphur dioxide market for Maharashtra (including large power plants, not just textiles), and advanced conversations in Pakistan and Brazil. Within Gujarat, a water pollution market is also in development.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Regulating pollution in low- and middle-income countries Rohini Pande and Nicholas Ryan, two co-authors of the paper discussed in this episode, on the political economy of pollution regulation in developing countries: why enforcement is hard, and what makes it work.
Air pollution and infant mortality Jennifer Burney on the health costs of particulate air pollution for young children, and what the evidence from Saharan dust patterns across Sub-Saharan Africa reveals about exposure and mortality.
The Social Cost of Carbon Michael Greenstone's earlier VoxDev Talk, on how assigning a monetary value to carbon emissions can drive better policy decisions and make the case for action that regulation alone struggles to make.
Related reading on VoxDev
Reducing air pollution: Evidence from payments to reduce crop burning in India How cash payments to farmers in northern India changed behaviour and cut the seasonal haze from crop fires that pushes Delhi's air quality to its worst each winter.
Paying to pollute: How carbon offsets actually raised emissions in China A cautionary study on market-based pollution controls: when incentives point the wrong way, a market can make things worse rather than better.
The effect of pollution on worker productivity: Evidence from call-centre workers in China Air pollution reduces cognitive performance and output, adding an economic productivity argument to the health case for cleaning the air.
A small number of Asian countries have provided thousands of high-skilled migrants to the US, many of whom have gone on to great success. What created this long-term trend, and what has it contributed to the US economy? And with changes in domestic policy, technology, and the opportunities in other countries, will it continue?
Gaurav Khanna of UC San Diego tells Tim Phillips the story of high-skilled migration to the US and warns of the consequences for the US economy if, in the future, they decide to go elsewhere – or stay at home.
With the number of global refugees continuing to rise, integrating refugees has become a difficult challenge for hosts – and it is far from easy for the refugees themselves. Dany Bahar of Brown University and Giovanni Peri of UC Davis tell Tim Phillips about a new review of the evidence that evaluates what policies have worked.
In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask what needs to happen before AI can take off in Africa.
Rose Mutiso talks us through the current state of energy and digital infrastructure in Africa, why leapfrogging is not guaranteed with AI, and what fundamental bottlenecks need to be addressed.
Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/technology-innovation/ai-africa-barriers-opportunities-and-policy
Almost everywhere, women have less economic power than men, and earn less at work. Their commitment to childcare and work in the home gives them less spare time than men, as well as less recognition for the value of what they do.
In another episodes based on the new book The London Consensus, published by LSE Press, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford, who one of the authors of the book’s chapter on Labour markets and gender inequality, and Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University, who wrote a response discuss with Tim Phillips whether there is a consensus on policy – and way to implement it – in this area.
Download The London Consensus. https://www.lse.ac.uk/school-of-public-policy/research/london-consensus
Agricultural yields across sub-Saharan Africa are falling. We can create better seeds, fertilisers and insecticides which has the potential to increase agricultural yields. But what stops that potential being realised? We put a lot of attention on how to influence the behaviour or the choices of farmers, but what can policy also do to help the firms, large and small, that provide the inputs that farmers use?
Hope Michelson of the University of Illinois is one of the authors of a new review of agricultural input markets. She tells Tim Phillips about the important gaps in our knowledge of how those markets are working.
The new book The London Consensus is a large and very comprehensive successor to the Washington Consensus that dominated policymaking during the 1990s. It attempts to capture where the Washington consensus fell short, and suggest better policy for development.
One area in which we need better policy is basic education. Despite the success of programmes to build and equip schools, outcomes are not improving. Pritchett’s chapter in The London Consensus examines the learning crisis and suggests what policy can do about it. He tells Tim Phillips that there are no short cuts – but examples from around the world show that solutions are possible.
Labor markets in poor countries are very different to labour markets in rich countries. Millions of young people in developing economies who will be starting work in the next few years will face rationed jobs, volatile employment, and low-quality work. How will they cope and how can policy best help them?
Emily Breza of Harvard University and Supreet Kaur of UC Berkeley are the authors of a new review of how labour markets in developing countries. They tell Tim Phillips some surprising facts about how labour markets work, what policy can do better – and what we still need to discover to help those young jobseekers find decent work.
Ideas in Development is VoxDev's new second podcast!
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Today we're bringing you one of the episodes from our new series. Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran ask how Costa Rica, a small country of approximately 5 million people, became an attractive hub that now hosts operations for more than 1,000 multinationals. To take us through this period of economic change, we were joined by Andres Valenciano Yamuni, who played his own role in Costa Rica’s FDI journey during his time as Minister of Foreign Trade.
It’s one thing to enrol kids at school. But that is the beginning of their education. When they are there, they need to learn – and unless that starts with learning to read, we’re failing in our duty to them.
A new report, produced by a group of literacy experts and is endorsed by GEEAP, shows that improving the quality of reading instruction can sharply increase reading levels in schools in LMICs, and calls on policymakers to act.
Benjamin Piper of the Gates Foundation joins Tim Phillips to talk about what works, and how it can be implemented.
When the work well, carbon markets worldwide decarbonise economies and direct funds to the most efficient projects. Yet for these mechanisms to be effective, credible, and equitable, should we move beyond today’s fragmented initiatives and create a unified global carbon market that would integrate compliance and voluntary markets, with consistent standards and pricing?
Robin Burgess of LSE and Rohini Pande of Yale are authors of a detailed proposal to design and implement this radical concept. Fresh from presenting the report’s insights at COP 30, they join Tim Phillips to explain the potential and transformative impact of a unified market for carbon.
Download the report https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Pande%20et%20al%20Draft%20Proposal%20for%20a%20Unified%20Carbon%20Market.pdf
Many papers in economics have shown the scale of the damage that slavery did to Africa, but can we also make the argument that the slave trade helped cause Europe’s economic development? Ellora Derenoncourt of Princeton is the author of a recently published paper which uses new methods and new data to investigate this question.
She talks to Tim Phillips about what historical records can and cannot tell us about that link, and what this data tells us about the growth of European port cities.
At home, men usually have more money and more power than their female partners, and this inequality is particularly wide in LMICs. What does research tell us about how decisions are made and, if there isn’t enough food or money or care to go around, who gets what? And when policymakers try to empower women do their well-intentioned policies work, and can they provoke a backlash? Seema Jayachandran of Princeton and Alessandra Voena of Stanford are the authors of a new review of the evidence, and they talk to Tim Phillips about why women’s power at home is so difficult to measure, and what we don’t yet know about how to increase it.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is common everywhere, but how common? What are its causes and effects? How can we do a better job of noticing it, measuring its impact – and ultimately, finding effective ways to stop it?
A new review of IPV looks at the recent economic research on the topic, what this work can tell us, and what questions are, so far, unanswered. Manisha Shah of UC Berkeley is one of the authors. She talks to Tim Phillips about why IPV is hard to measure, and even harder to prevent.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/intimate-partner-violence-causes-costs-and-prevention
The modern state, and the way in which is governs, is clearly very important. It provides social programs, education, disaster relief or, on the other side, it can cause violence and repression.
We tend to assume that there is one model of a successful state, and the emergence of government has followed a single path with, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, “Getting to Denmark” as its end point. But is that the story that the historical record tells? And are successful states today, even in high-income countries, all governed in a way that matches our assumptions?
Leander Heldring of Northwestern University is the author of a chapter on the forthcoming Handbook of Political Economy that examines the historical data and the types of government that have succeeded and failed. He tells Tim Phillips what he has discovered about what types of bureaucracy have succeeded in history, what forms of government that citizens in different times and places have chosen, and whether there is one true evolutionary path to a successful state.
We think of trade-driven growth during the era of hyper-globalisation as having created many “growth miracles” since the 1990s. But how did that happen? If we look at what created these miracles more closely, will that help us to understand how the geopolitical and technology shifts of the last decade have affected, and will continue to affect, the relationship between international trade and development?
Penny Goldberg of Yale and Michele Ruta of the IMF are the authors of a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Development that questions many of our assumptions about the role of trade in growth miracles. They tell Tim Phillips about how this engine of development really worked – and why it might not work as well in future.
How can we train the next generation of entrepreneurs? In developing economies, more than a billion dollars a year is spent on this type of training, but does it work, are we training the right people with the right skills – and what opportunities are there to do better?
David McKenzie of the World Bank is one of the senior editors of the latest version of the VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs. He tells Tim Phillips what we know about what training can achieve, why training programmes are not “one size fits all”, and what this all means for policy.
The VoxDevLit on training entrepreneurs: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/training-entrepreneurs
What is the relationship between religion and economic development? Does economic development mean fewer people become religious, or more? What causes people to believe, and does organised religion adapt as societies change, and competition from other religions increases?
Sara Lowes of UC San Diego, Eduardo Montero on the University of Chicago, and Benjamin Marx of Boston University are the authors of a new review of religion in emerging and developing regions. They talk to Tim Phillips about how our assumptions about what religion is, and why people believe, are not always accurate – and how an understanding of religiosity can help policymakers understand our motivations and create social policy that is effective.
“ Africa must become a full participant in global knowledge production, not just a passive recipient of solutions from elsewhere.” The journey of Leonard Wantchekon from teenage revolutionary in Benin to professor of economics at Princeton also led him to found the African School of Economics.
In this week's episode, Leonard talks to Tim Phillips about what he learned from imprisonment and torture, how to improve African democracy, the legacy of slavery on trust, and how African economists can contribute to development in the region.
A fascinating new book called A Sixth of Humanity, Independent India’s Development Odyssey examines 75 years of development in the world’s most populous country – the successes and failures, the compromises, and the ways in which India has defied many of our ideas of how development should happen. The authors are Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute, also of course formerly Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. They speak to Tim Phillips about what Indian politicians and policymakers around the world can learn from India’s economic transformation.
The book is called A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey. It is published by HarperCollins India. https://harpercollins.co.in/product/a-sixth-of-humanity/
Policymakers and politicians like to talk about creating infrastructure like roads, schools and transport systems: how it grows the economy, provides jobs, and strengthens domestic firms. But that infrastructure needs raw materials, people and constructors to create it. Martina Kirchberger of Trinity College Dublin is an expert on how stuff gets built in developing countries. Are the materials they need expensive? Will a construction boom also create jobs? Are there local firms who can do the work and, if not, who makes projects happen in the global construction sector? She talks to Tim Phillips about investment, partnership, and the surprising cost of cement.
Everywhere, women’s labour force participation is lower than men’s. There are many reasons to close this gap, but there are just as many reasons why it’s hard to do it. Research is discovering new and important insights into how financial constraints, social norms, the backlash from man and the problems of travelling safely reduce the opportunities to work from home. But which policies can change this? Release 2 of the VoxDev Lit on Female Labour Force Participation sets out this research, and Rachel Heath of the University of Washington tells Tim Phillips what it tells us about how work helps women, and policy helps women to find work.
When children are victims of bullying or social exclusion at school, it can be devastating for every part of their lives. This is a global problem, but with a global solution: if we can teach kids about empathy, self-control, or the effects of their violent behaviour, it can reduce bullying. How well do these policies work, and can they be scaled up successfully?
JPAL is about to publish a policy insight on this topic, bringing together the research and summarising what we know. Sule Alan of Cornell University tells Tim Phillips about how we can spot bullying and exclusion in the classroom, and the interventions that work.
Macroeconomists know that our economic activity influences – and is influenced by – the natural environment in which it is embedded, but we have learned that modelling those effects is far from easy. The scientific consensus around climate change is strong, but there’s not similar agreement over appropriate economic policies to deal with it. On the eve of COP 30, a new review of macroeconomics and climate shows how far we have come but also points out where the gaps in our knowledge are.
Adrien Bilal of Stanford University tells Tim Phillips about the state of research, its missing links, and the limits of what economists can do to influence the policy agenda.
How does culture affect development policy, and how does development policy affect culture? If we don’t take account of cultural norms or fail to learn about how they interact with well-intentioned polices, then this gap in our knowledge may be undermining development projects. Can better measurement and collaboration with other social sciences fill these gaps? A new paper investigates what we know about the culture, policy, and economic development, and Natalie Bau of UCLA, Sara Lowes of UC San Diego, and Eduardo Montero of the University of Chicago tell Tim Phillips about the potential, and pitfalls, of research into culture.
With record levels of armed conflict around the world in recent years, the study of conflict has gone from being a niche corner of economics into a thriving discipline that learns from, and interacts with, development economics. Rigorous empirical research on conflict is, however, relatively recent.
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme aims to provide a better understanding of the links between conflicts, economic growth, and public policies. this week we speak to Dominic Rohner (Geneva Graduate Institute), the Research Director of the programme, and Oliver Vanden Eynde (Paris School of Economics), the Head of Engagement about their new research that attempts to link the attributes of countries to the types of conflict they experience, how economic methods can advance our knowledge of conflict and the policies to reduce it, and what the work of ReCIPE can do to influence policy around conflict and development.
In 2025, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is 50 years old. “Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World”, its 2025 Global Food Policy Report, runs to just under 600 pages and covers the last five decades of progress in improving the world’s food systems – but also the challenges that remain, and the need for policy to keep evolving if we are going to build sustainable, healthy food systems.
Johan Swinnen and Purnima Menon of IFPRI talk to Tim Phillips about the importance of agrifood resilience. With changes in the global economy, the equity and effectiveness of these food value chains will affect the livelihoods of billions of people. But has the progress in the last 50 years stalled?
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/food-policy-lessons-and-priorities-changing-world
Download the report: https://www.ifpri.org/global-food-policy-report/
What happens from the moment goods are manufactured or harvested, until they are bought by consumers? As we know from experience, most of the things we consume reach us having been bought and sold, sometimes many times, by intermediaries – most of us don’t order a phone from the factory. Many interventions designed to increase the welfare of consumers in developing economies are designed to shorten these supply chains by cutting out those traders in the middle. But what happens when you do that in the real world?
Meredith Startz of Dartmouth College tells Tim Phillips why the story of what intermediaries deliver, and even their effect on the prices consumers pay, is more nuanced than our economic models often suggest.
Like all of us, healthcare providers bring their biases to work. But if those biases result in a reduced level of care for their patients, how can we correct them?
An innovative experiment in three very different countries attempted to reduce bias in contraceptive care for women. Zachary Wagner of USC and Manisha Shah of UC Berkeley were two of a multidisciplinary team that implemented program and evaluated the results. They talk to Tim Phillips about how biases shape contraceptive care, the methods that can help us to understand why they arise, and the challenges of creating a program that can work in different cultural and religious settings.
In the second of our two podcasts with Francis Annan of UC Berkeley on his research on mobile money first in Ghana, then beyond, Tim Phillips discusses how he worked with commercial providers, not just to set up the RCTs designed to investigate the extent and reduce financial fraud, but to ensure that the insights could be scaled up.
While contacting sceptical commercial providers can often meet with little or no response, he says, the ability to frame research in a way that makes them realise the commercial value as well as the social value can get, and keep, their attention – and lead to a long-run partnership that achieves more than working independently or through regulators.
How can we design digital financial inclusion that minimizes fraud and maximises the benefit to the community in rural, low-trust, or cash-heavy economies? That’s the question posed by three studies of how mobile money works, or sometimes does not work, in Ghana’s villages. The author of those three studies: Francis Annan of Berkeley.
In part one of a two-part VoxDev Talks special, Tim Phillips talks to Francis about this research, which has been a big part of his working life since he was a graduate student, the innovative interventions to minimise fraud and misconduct from the agents who supply mobile money, and what this tells us about how to protect consumers in remote locations.
Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/finance/mobile-money-ghana-lessons-boosting-financial-inclusion
Stigma, shame and social norms around menstruation can prevent women and girls managing their periods with dignity and hygiene in low-income settings. So how can we provide information, influence those norms, and change behaviour to improve women’s health and well-being? Silvia Castro of LMU Munich and Kristina Czura of University of Groningen have conducted extensive field research in Bangladesh and other countries.
They tell Tim Phillips how we can reduce the stigma and taboo around menstruation and give women and girls the information they need at home, at school, and at work.
Read about Silvia’s work on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/breaking-silence-advancing-health-technology-adoption-through-open-discourse
There is a long history of using “edutainment” – mass media storytelling, to pass on information about important social issues, and even to try to change behaviour. But does this work, and in what circumstances can it help?
Amber Peterman of UNICEF has just published a review of what we know about edutainment’s power to reduce violence against women and children. She talks to Tim Phillips about its track record in changing attitudes to problems such as FGM and child marriage, and the potential of edutainment in social media and even graphic novels.
Many developed countries are creating immigration policies designed specifically to attract the most talented migrants. We often assume that when those skilled and educated citizens migrate from low-income countries in search of high-paying opportunities, it causes a “brain drain” in their home countries, delaying or hobbling development. A new article in the journal Science puts that assumption to the test and finds that there is also the possibility of a brain gain at home, as investments in education, remittances, and the contribution of the diaspora to investment and changing norms can more the compensate for the loss of skills.
Cátia Batista of Nova School of Business and Economics and Caroline Theoharides of Amherst College are two of the authors of the article, and they tell Tim Phillips about what the potential for brain gains, but also the policies that are needed to make sure this happens.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/why-brain-drain-incomplete-story-migration
In the second of our special episodes recorded at the 5th annual STEG conference, Lucas Conwell of UCL talks to Tim Phillips about how the private minibus networks, such a distinctive feature of urban transit in developing country cities, can improve their service when there is little room for public investment or regulation.
If you have ever tried them, they can seem chaotic, but would require large or small policy tweaks to make them work efficiently, and what would those tweaks be? Lucas has mapped both the service and the opinions of passengers for Cape Town’s public transit minibuses, and discovered that minimal intervention could improve services, increase security, and decrease wait times.
Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/infrastructure/minibuses-major-gains-rethinking-urban-transit-developing-countries
Find out more about STEG at https://steg.cepr.org
This week on VoxDev talks we have two special episodes recorded at the 5th annual STEG conference. STEG is a research initiative that aims to provide a better understanding of structural change, productivity, and growth in low- and middle-income countries.
For many economies in the Global South, fossil fuel extraction has been both a blessing
and a curse. Nowhere more so than Nigeria, where oil production generates huge
revenues, but also creates an environmental and social burden for the people who live in oil producing regions.
Arinze Nwokolo of Lagos Business School has investigated one aspect of this burden: how gas flaring that occurs as part of the oil production process affects local agriculture. He talks to Tim Phillips about the dramatic impact it has on agricultural productivity, and how the policy alternatives can change those outcomes.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/gas-flaring-threatens-agriculture-and-livelihoods-nigeria
Find out more about STEG at https://steg.cepr.org
In October 2024, Prabowo Subianto became president of Indonesia. He inherits the “Golden Indonesia” vision: By the time the country celebrates 100 years of independence in 2045, it aims to be one of the five largest economies in the world. But if Indonesia remains dependent on commodity exports like palm oil, coal, natural gas, and rubber, does it risk getting stuck in the “middle income trap” – too wealthy to compete with low-wage nations, but without the human capital or technology to become a HIC?
Chatib Basri is an economist and former finance minister of Indonesia. He tells Tim Phillips about the industrial policies needed to accelerate Indonesia’s economy and diversify its exports, and the challenges if Indonesia does not accelerate its growth.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/going-economic-growth-lessons-indonesia
Also on VoxDev: Is improving tax administration more effective than raising tax rates?
https://voxdev.org/topic/public-economics/improving-tax-administration-more-effective-raising-tax-rates-evidence
In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney discusses one of Africa’s most persistent development challenges: the low productivity of smallholder farmers. Despite decades of investment, innovation, and policy reform, yields on African small farms remain significantly below those in high-income countries. While the limitations of smallholder models, that doesn’t mean that the problem is easy to solve, not least because the way that land is owned my make consolidation impossible. The result: fewer opportunities for structural transformation and rural development.
Catherine is joined by Gérardine Mukeshimana, former Minister of Agriculture in Rwanda, Christopher Udry of Northwestern University and Mark Rosenzweig of Yale University.
It was almost business as usual at the Education World Forum in London last month. At the world’s largest annual gathering of education and skills ministers, this year’s theme was & "Building stronger, bolder, better education together." But the context was far from routine. The conference took place against a backdrop of global funding cuts to education programmes—the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that more than 35 million children around the world depend on foreign aid for their basic education. How can policy be strong, bold, or better in the face of these cuts?
Ben Piper, Director of Global Education at the Gates Foundation and a panellist on the
Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), was at the conference, meeting
education ministers and discussing these problems with them. He tells Tim Phillips that, at a time when funding is scarce, foundational learning projects deliver cost-effective results for policymakers, and huge benefits for children.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/education/why-we-need-invest-foundational-learning
From Brazil, we bring good news for poverty reduction: Brazil’s formerly sky-high wage
inequality is not quite so sky-high anymore. From 1995 to 2015 Brazil became a more equal society, a trend that contrasts with rising inequality during that time in high-income countries. A soon-to-be-published article in the Journal of Economic Literature reviews the research that estimates the reduction, discovers the factors that have contributed to it and the mechanisms that have driven it. Alysson Portella of Insper tells Tim Phillips why there is no silver bullet that policymakers can use to reduce inequality, and why both implementing and evaluating policies in Brazil can be even more challenging than in other countries.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/understanding-brazils-falling-income-inequality
AI’s boosters claim that it is going to revolutionize growth in the developing world. The
sceptics, many of whom are economists, point to a thin evidence base and the risk of
unintended consequences. This is not an easy question to research, not least because the underlying technologies are literally changing by the day, while the pace of academic research is often measured in years. One of those researchers is David Yanagizawa-Drott of the University of Zurich. We spoke to him about his hopes and fears for AI, how he keeps his research relevant, and how economists can influence the future applications of AI.
The Social Catalyst Lab: https://socialcatalystlab.org/
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme
was established in April 2024 as a CEPR research initiative to provide a better understanding of the links between conflict, economic growth, and public policies. One of its themes is the link between conflict and hate speech, social media use, media bias, and propaganda. We need to know more about how media has influenced violence,
xenophobia, and recruitment for armed groups. Also, how we can use media sentiment to predict a rise in the risk of violence.
Maria Petrova of the Barcelona School of Economics and Augustin Tapsoba of the Toulouse School of Economics are the theme leaders. They spoke to Tim Phillips about the challenges of researching the impact of media, especially social media, on conflict, and what recent research has discovered.
As aid programs are cut across the developing world, the focus falls on what investors can do to help create economic growth. Someone who knows all about impact investing is Yonas Alemu, the founder of Lovegrass Ethiopia, which creates products from teff, a gluten- free grain that's native to Ethiopia and sells them across the world. Yonas abandoned a successful career in investment banking in London to create a business in the country of his birth. He spoke to Tim Phillips about how entrepreneurship can stimulate positive change across Africa and how negative stereotypes of Africa’s dependency on aid discourage investment.
Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/firms/building-business-roots-yonas-alemus-journey-ethiopian-entrepreneur
Discover more about Lovegrass Ethiopia’s products and history: https://thelovegrass.com/
Millions of people around the world have no access to sanitation. They defecate in the open, or in facilities where it’s hard to avoid human contact, unavoidably spreading disease. One of the Sustainable Development Goals that you don’t hear about so much is the call to end open defecation by 2030. What progress are we making, and what health improvements are we seeing so far? In the latest of our episodes based on J-PAL’s policy insights, Karen Macours of the Paris School of Economics, also co-chair of J-PAL's Health Sector, tells Tim Phillips about how we can achieve this development goal, why it’s not a quick fix, and the surprising results of research into the health benefits of improving sanitation.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/improving-sanitation-what-works-and-what-doesnt
Read the Policy Insight on J-PAL: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/policy-insight/improving-sanitation-access-subsidies-loans-and-community-led-programs
We often talk about providing not just jobs, but decent jobs, in developing countries. But in many parts of the world, workers still have incredibly harsh working conditions.
There have been interventions at the firm level to create safer workplaces, better health,
higher job satisfaction. But have they succeeded? And, if these policies succeed in raising worker well-being, is there a cost or a benefit for the employer?
In the latest in our collaborations with J-PAL to discuss their policy insights, Achyuta
Adhvaryu, UC San Diego about their review of the research into worker well-being, the
policies that encourage firms to improve it, and the outcomes for employees and employers alike.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets/improving-worker-well-being-good-workers-good-business
You can find the review here https://www.povertyactionlab.org/
A large proportion of economic activity takes place in the informal sector in every country, particularly in LMICs. Informality, and the lack of rights and protection that goes with it, affects the families who live in slums, the people who take off-the-books jobs, and the firms that choose to skirt regulations. It also affects the governments who want to increase the size of the formal sector – and the revenue they can collect from it.
Gabriel Ulyssea of UCL and Mariaflavia Harari of the University of Pennsylvania are two of the editors of new VoxDevLit that examines what we know about the size of the informal sector and how it operates. They talk to Tim Phillips about the grey areas between formal and informal, and the limitations of policies that try to increase the size of the formal economy.
Read the VoxDevLit here: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/informality
In 1981, 44% of the world’s population were living in extreme poverty. By 2019, that number had fallen to 9%. This seems like a good news story, but how did it happen?
Tom Vogl of UC San Diego is one of the authors of a paper called simply, “How Poverty
Fell”. In it, they use surveys to track the progress out of poverty of individuals and
generations, to discover whether this progress has been driven by individuals and families becoming less poor over their lives or by successive generations who are less likely to be born into poverty. Has the progress been driven by women in the workplace, by government support, or by the move out of agriculture? And, significantly, do those who move out of poverty stay in that position or, is it, as Tom tells Tim Phillips, “Like climbing a slippery slope”?
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/methods-measurement/how-has-global-poverty-fallen
Read the paper: https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~pniehaus/papers/how_poverty_fell.pdf
In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney is asking one of the most complex questions in global development: how can the clean energy transition move forward quickly and equitably, particularly for low- and middle-income countries still grappling with poverty? There is a balance between emissions reductions and economic growth. While wealthy nations historically contributed the most to climate change, LMICs are now under pressure to take costly action to avoid it.
Catherine is joined by Max Bearak of the New York Times, Jessica Seddon of Yale Jackson School and the Dietz Family Initiative on Environment and Global Affairs, and Anant Sudarshan of the University of Warwick and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/climate-capital-and-conscience-who-will-pay-global-energy-transition
The Graduation approach to helping people to escape from poverty was pioneered in 2002 by BRAC in Bangladesh. Today the approach is used around the world. In more than 20 years, what have we learned about how it works, when it works best, and how to implement it at scale? Shameran Abed, the Executive Director of BRAC International talks to Tim Phillips about how the Graduation approach reaches people that other programmes miss, why it works, and how it can be scaled up to meet needs around the world.
Read the full show notes
The BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative
Multinational enterprises in every industry are shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions. These corporate tax havens reduce tax revenues everywhere, but that hits hardest in developing countries where corporate taxes are a larger part of the overall tax take. The International Growth Centre has published a policy toolkit report into corporate tax havens. Ludvig Wier, the author, explains to Tim Phillips how profit shifting works, how a global initiative is reducing the allure of tax havens, and how AI might level the playing field for overstretched developing country tax offices.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/public-economics/profit-shifting-global-challenge-hitting-developing-countries-hardest
IGC Policy Toolkit: Corporate tax havens and their impact on development
Vocational training is often seen as a silver bullet for unemployment and poverty, but does the evidence support that view? Why do so many training programs fail to lead to real job opportunities, and are we asking too much of these programs – or maybe the wrong questions entirely? In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney is joined by Oriana Bandiera, professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Stefano Caria, professor of economics at the University of Warwick, and Munshi Sulaiman, Director of Research at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development and a professor in the Master of Development Studies program at BRAC University, to ask what it takes to make job skills programs work.
A fundamental part of women’s economic empowerment is helping women who want to work outside the home to find and keep a job. A major part of that decision is ensuring that they can travel to work without fear of stigma, harassment or violence on public transport. In Pakistan, a study set out to discover whether an offer of safe commuter transport would tempt women who are currently not looking for a job.
Kate Vyborny of the World Bank spoke to Tim Phillips from Lahore, where the study
took place, about the challenges women face in commuting to work and about how safe transport can change career opportunities for millions of women.
Photo credit: ADB
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/infrastructure/how-safe-transport-could-unlock-womens-labour-force-participation-pakistan
How does rising external debt in low-income countries affect the natural capital that
sustains our livelihoods? A new paper focuses on three river basins that are vital to the
livelihoods and biodiversity of the countries that surround them, suggesting ways that
we can both measure and conserve that natural capital in the face of the economic
forces that threaten it. Pushpam Kumar of UN Environment Programme talks to Tim
Phillips about the alarming rise in the ratio of debt to natural capital for the 21 countries whose wealth relies on the river basins that they border, and how debt-for-nature swaps may be our best hope of avoiding both an economic and ecological disaster.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/debt-leading-unsustainable-exploitation-natural-resources
Geopolitical alliances are changing rapidly. Technological innovation is reshaping our economies. These trends offer a cocktail of risk and reward for countries in the global south. They are also both topics that are familiar to Simon Johnson of MIT.
Simon speaks to Tim Phillips about how policy in developing countries should respond to President Trump’s deglobalization agenda, how artificial intelligence changes the future for all countries, and where growth and jobs will come from in the future.
And of course, what it was like to win the Nobel Prize.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/geopolitics-ai-future-global-development-conversation-simon-johnson
Sahel and West Africa Club: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/directorates/sahel-and-west-africa-club.html
Power and progress: https://shapingwork.mit.edu/power-and-progress/
Civil war – the latest in a long series of armed conflicts – broke out in Sudan in April
2023. Today, more than half of the population needs humanitarian aid, and almost 15
million people have been displaced. The war has also devastated the digital
infrastructure in Sudan, deepening the crisis. African Renaissance Ventures is a VC firm
that backs entrepreneurs who use technology to solve major development challenges.
Magdi Amin tells Tim Phillips about how its infrastructure might be restored, and the
risks to Sudan’s population if it is not.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/rebuilding-sudans-digital-infrastructure-amidst-conflict
Bangladesh's development story in the 21st century is often regarded as a model of
resilience and progress. But on 5 August 2024, student-led protests and public unrest
caused Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister, to resign and flee to India. An
interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus, took over. Six months on, Bangladesh’s
political and economic future is unclear. Imran Matin, Executive Director, BRAC Institute
of Governance and Development (BIGD), is one of the experts in Bangladesh who are
attempting to discover and communicate a clearer picture of the country’s present – and its options for the future. He talks to Tim Phillips about how evidence-based policy can give the country a path forward.
With populist politicians taking power around the world, policymakers are relying less
on research and expertise, as their political narratives prioritise emotion and identity
over facts. This may have long-term consequences for global development: not least
in the US, where the Agency for International Development has been dismantled,
with thousands of staff laid off. Critical development programs have been halted, and
the future of US foreign assistance is in limbo. In the latest episode of the
collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine
Cheney asks Rory Stewart, former UK Secretary of State for International
Development, Stefan Dercon of the University of Oxford and formerly chief
economist of the UK Department for International Development, and Trudi Makhaya,
former economic advisor to the President of South Africa, how we can ensure that
facts and evidence still matter in policymaking.
Check out the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/development-dialogues-future-evidence-based-policymaking-and
What are the price impacts of cash transfer programs? Do they raise prices as well
as incomes? And what is the impact on people in the community who don’t receive
the transfer? Eeshani Kandpal of the Center for Global Development is one of the
researchers who has investigated this topic. She talks to Tim Phillips about the
conclusions of her own research, the insights of other economists, and the
implications for policy.
How does a healthy ecosystem benefit humanity? How does the normal functioning
of the economy impact natural habitats and animal populations? And what are the
costs and benefits of conservation? Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago works at
the intersection of economics and conservation. He speaks to Tim Phillips about how
economic growth often has a hidden environmental cost.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/economics-ecosystems-how-nature-and-economies-interact
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE)
programme, established in April 2024, aims to provide a better understanding of the
links between conflict, economic growth, and public policies. One of its many themes
is on what happens post-conflict: peacemaking, peacebuilding, and reconstruction.
Salma Mousa and Lisa Hultman, theme leaders, talk to Tim Phillips about why
peacebuilding must always be both bottom-up and top-down if it is going to work.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/peacemaking-peacebuilding-and-post-war-reconstruction
Published this week: the latest VoxDevLit covers microfinance. After many decades,
microfinance is pervasive and popular in developing countries but is often
controversial. What have we learned about what works, how it works, and who it
helps – and what is there still to understand? Authors Simon Quinn, Muhammad
Meki, and Jing Cai talk to Tim Phillips about the problems of evaluation, the
surprising uses to which microfinance has been put, and the lessons that
policymakers can learn from the story of microfinance so far.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/finance/what-have-we-learned-about-microfinance
Read and download the VoxDevLit from our new look website here: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/microfinance
In 2018, “Unorthodox policies for unorthodox times” was the title of the first in a
series of blogs published by the International Growth Centre. The authors argued
that the environment for development had changed, and so development policies
should change too. Seven years on, as delegates gather in Davos for the 2025
Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, how prescient was the analysis in
these articles, and what does this mean for future growth policy? Tim Dobermann
and Francesco Caselli talk to Tim Phillips about which “unorthodox policies” the
delegates to Davos should be discussing this week.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/how-can-countries-develop-their-economies-changed-world
Many development economists would argue that the most important innovation of
the last two decades has been a commitment to use only rigorous evidence for
policy, and usually what they mean is evidence generated by RCTs. But are
systematic reviews of the results a useful guide to policy? And should development
economics continue to be focusing so much on the programmes that flow from RCT-
driven research? Lant Pritchett of LSE talks to Tim Phillips about the nature of
“rigorous” evidence in development economics, and the future of the discipline itself.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/rethinking-evidence-and-refocusing-growth-development-economics
For more than 30 years, optimists about technology have been telling us that the
internet is transforming our economies. What is the evidence that this has happened,
or is happening, in low- or middle-income countries? And if the promise has not been
fulfilled, why not? Lin Tian is one of the authors of a new paper that examines the
evidence so far. She talks to Tim Phillips about what the research is telling us.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/how-does-internet-connectivity-impact-developing-economies
Chris Woodruff has pioneered academic research into businesses, large and small, in low-income countries, He is also a non-executive Director of British International Investment (BII), a development finance institution and impact investor that partners with more than 1,500 businesses in emerging economies, with assets of £8.1 billion. Chris talks to Tim Phillips about what he has learned from his association with BII into how research can inform policy and investment – and whether economists worry too much about external validity.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/firms/role-evidence-development-finance-institutions
In the second episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center
and VoxDev, Catherine Cheney speaks to Amit Khandelwal of the Yale Jackson
School of Public Affairs, Isabela Manelici of the London School of Economics, and
Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute, As globalisation faces new headwinds,
they discuss the outlook for those countries that didn’t reap the trade benefits from
the spread of globalisation, and the new challenges for LMICs.
When citizens demand change and feel they are not being heard, they protest on the
streets. Thanks to social media and TV coverage, we see protests every night on the
news. But has the frequency or the character of protests changed? Who is
protesting, and what makes them take to the streets? David Yang and Noam
Yuchtman are two of the authors of a new review of the literature on protests. They
tell Tim Phillips what they discovered.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/why-do-protests-matter-exploring-their-causes-and-lasting
In our final episode based on this year’s BREAD-IGC virtual PhD-level course on the
economics of cities in low and middle-income countries, Matthew Kahn of USC and
Siqi Zheng of MIT focus on sustainable urbanisation. They tell Tim Phillips about how
cities can adapt in the face of climate change, both its inhabitants and its buildings.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/how-urban-environment-can-adapt-climate-change
If you’re applying for a job, you want to know what you’re good at, and be able to
prove it to the recruiter. If doing the recruiting, you want some evidence about who
the best candidates would be. In low- or middle-income countries, this information is
often in short supply. How does this affect who gets a job, and the hiring process? In
the latest in our collaborations with J-Pal to discuss their policy insights, Marianne
Bertrand of Chicago Booth School, also Co-Chair, Labor Markets at J-Pal, and
Stefano Caria of the University of Warwick, tell Tim Phillips about the impact of skills
signals on employment.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets/helping-jobseekers-signal-their-skills-cost-effective-strategy-benefitting
There are more than 1.4 million papers about cash transfers. They inspired Ugo
Gentilini, lead economist for social protection at the World Bank, to spend five years
researching the surprisingly long and rich history of these cash transfers. The
resulting book, called “Timely Cash: Lessons From 2,500 Years of Giving People
Money”, shows that the political and ethical debates that cash transfers inspire are
centuries, sometimes millennia, old. In a special episode to mark the launch of his
book, Ugo explains to Tim Phillips how we can draw on history to understand the
current, sometimes heated, debates about why, when, and where cash transfers
should be used.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/history-cash-transfers
Where does electricity come from? In developing countries, the power sector uses
long-term, rigid contracts called power purchase agreements (PPAs) between a
private generator and government-owned utilities. These PPAs are not usually
competitive, their terms – including payment guarantees by which suppliers get paid
even when there is no demand – are often secret, they can last for up to 30 years,
and they guarantee the use of fossil fuels far into the future. Sugandha Srivastav
tells Tim Phillips about how the privatisation of electricity generation has created a
way to move money “from the public coffers to vested interests”.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/why-pakistan-locked-overpriced-and-environmentally-damaging-power-sector
Can better data analysis improve the way that a government functions. The
Government Analytics Handbook, published by the World Bank, is both a practical
how-to guide and a fascinating insight into how administrators can improve the
quality of government analytics. Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster are the
editors. They talk to Tim Phillips about the challenges, the potential – and their work
to create a community of analysts.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/public-economics/how-government-analytics-can-improve-public-sector-implementation
As cities grow and spread, the uses to which land is put, and the value of that land,
will also change. The challenges of urban planning, construction and renewal are
complicated. But the way we address those challenges has profound impacts for the
people who live, and will live, in that physical city. Vernon Henderson and Maisy
Wong of University of Pennsylvania explain to Tim Phillips how cities adapt, change
and grow – and how that affects the lives and prospects of the people who live in
them.
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and so it has never been
more important to increase the resilience of small-scale farmers. What does
research tell us are the most effective interventions and policies to do this? In the
latest of our special episodes to discuss J-PAL policy insights, Tavneet Suri talks to
Tim Phillips about how we can strengthen the resilience of farmers to climate
change.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/financing-climate-adaptation-what-works-what-doesnt-and-can-carbon-credits
In the first episode of a regular collaboration between Yale's Economic Growth
Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney speaks to Catherine Wolfram and
Namrata Kala of the MIT Sloan School, and Rohini Pande of Yale, about how to
finance climate adaptation. They discuss what works and what doesn't, what role
carbon markets play, and also discuss the upcoming United Nations Climate
Change Summit, COP 29.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/financing-climate-adaptation-what-works-what-doesnt-and-can-carbon-credits
If you go to the IGC web site, you will discover the BREAD-IGC virtual PhD-level
course in economics. The topic for 2024 is urbanisation and the economics of cities
in low and middle-income countries. Ed Glaeser and Diego Puga gave the first talk,
about the dynamic city. They talk to Tim Phillips about what attracts people to cities,
how those cities constantly change and adapt to the needs of those new arrivals,
and the urgent need for research into how cities grow and change outside high-
income countries.
Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/role-cities-economic-development
Institutions help to determine economic growth. But studying how they do this using
the rigorous experimental techniques popularised in the credibility revolution is
difficult. A new review highlights an exciting new wave of empirical research into the
consequences of institutional change. Michael Callen and Jonathan Weigel talk to
Tim Phillips about how we can do experiments about institutions.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/can-we-use-experiments-understand-institutions
A new open access textbook called Food Economics analyses the connections
between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and retail
markets. It covers how food is produced, brought to market, and sold. But it also
looks at consumption: why many have too little food, and the problems caused by
malnutrition. Will Masters and Amelia Finaret, the authors, tell Tim Phillips who is it
for, and what they can learn.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/agriculture/what-can-we-learn-food-economics
Small businesses in LMICs provide most of the employment. But they could provide
many more jobs if the best of them could unlock their potential to grow. In the latest
of our series of VoxDev Talks based on J-PAL special reports, Tim Phillips talks to
David Atkin about how we can do a better job of connecting firms and entrepreneurs
to markets.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/firms/how-connecting-firms-markets-can-promote-economic-development
More children than ever in LMICs go to school – but they still don’t learn as much as
we would want, and the difference between the educational haves and the have-nots
is widening. Noam Angrist joins Tim Phillips to talk about the size of the gap between
education policy and practice, why it exists, why economic development alone isn’t
closing it, and how we can improve policy implementation in future.
Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/education/gap-between-education-policy-and-practice
Since 2020, governments everywhere have had to grapple with the impacts of first
Covid-19 and then a series of global shocks, not least the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. The challenges have been particularly acute in Africa. Christopher Adam
has seen the impacts of these shocks at first hand – and has also advised some of
the people who have been making policy in Africa to mitigate their effects. He talks to
Tim Phillips about how global shocks constrain Africa’s policymakers and how the
after-effects of this “polycrisis” will be felt in future.
Dev Patel of Harvard describes Bangladesh as “ground zero for the harmful effects
of climate change”. Extreme weather events, particularly floods, are already affecting
the lives of millions of people who live there and are making life more difficult for the
country’s farmers. He tells Tim Phillips how he harnessed machine learning to create
for the first time reliable global data on flooding – and also used his methods to find a
way to give Bangladesh’s beleaguered farmers better data on what crops to grow.
Check out the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/how-do-floods-impact-economic-development
In a meritocracy more people can do jobs that match their skills, making them more productive. It’s not just good for them, it’s good for the economy too. So how effective are the policies that try to make countries more meritocratic? Oriana Bandiera and Ilse Lindenlaub tell Tim Phillips how much productivity countries are sacrificing because the wrong people are in the wrong jobs, which countries are most meritocratic, and how we can best help the others to catch up.
Check out the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/how-meritocracy-varies-across-world
More people die from contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation than from
water-related disasters. What are the consequences if we don’t provide safe drinking
water, especially for children, and what technologies and policies can accelerate that
change? In the first of a series of VoxDev Talks based on J-PAL special reports,
Pascaline Dupas of Princeton, also Scientific Director for J-PAL Africa, explains the
importance of clean water to Tim Phillips.
Pranab Bardhan of Berkeley has recently published a memoir called Charaiveti: An
Academic’s Global Journey. It takes in his childhood in India, and his academic
career in the UK, India and the US. The book takes in topics as diverse as whether
the questions Marx asked are still relevant today, what economists can learn from
anthropologists, what the Chinese government got right (and wrong), and the
dangers of offering policy prescriptions for places we have never visited. He talks to
Tim Phillips about the past, and the future, of development economics.
Check out the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/past-present-and-future-development-economics
We don’t know much about economic mobility in developing countries compared to
the wealthier, data-rich societies which have been the subjects of so much recent
research. What does the data tell us so far, and what is important to find out? Debraj
Ray and Garance Genicot tell Tim Phillips why measuring upward mobility in low-
and middle-income countries is both difficult and important, and what their research
is revealing about the impact of growth on that mobility.
In May 2024 the world’s largest gathering of education and skills ministers took place
in London. Tahir Andrabi was there to meet policymakers in his capacity as a
member of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP). GEEAP
analyses existing research in education to discover which policies are “smart buys”
for governments, and which are not. He talks to Tim Phillips to talk about how
policymakers respond when their ideas are challenged, and the potential benefits
from making better decisions about education policy.
Conflict destroys people, communities, and entire economies. If we reduce the amount of conflict in the world, we save lives and reduce poverty. Dominic Rohner of the University of Lausanne tells Tim Phillips about his new book called The Peace Formula, which sets out a different way to prevent and resolve conflict.
It makes sense that vocational training and apprenticeships would be an effective way to help young people find productive work in the global south. But evidence to support this reasonable assumption has been weak, and many researchers find little or no effect. Subha Mani and Neha Agarwal have reviewed the evidence, and they tell Tim Phillips that one type of training shows strong results. It’s just not the type that is often implemented.
Mothers traditionally provide most of the care for children in early years. What role
do fathers play, what difference would it make if they did more, and how could policy
incentivise them to do exactly that? David Evans and Pamela Jakiela talk to Tim
Phillips about the benefit of involving fathers in early childhood development, but
also how adapting parenting programmes to involve fathers isn’t straightforward.
Paul Collier has for many years challenged the conventional wisdom of development
economics, bringing our attention to the real-world impact of policies many of us take
for granted. His new book is called Left Behind. It is about how some countries or
regions in the world fall behind, and what we can do to help them recover. In this
week’s episode he talks to Tim Phillips about what causes a place to be left behind,
the difficulty in stopping that downward spiral, and what the places that have
recovered have in common.
If women in developing countries want to work, what keeps them out of the labour
force? Is it the other tasks they have to do, or the expectations of the people around
them? Two new papers experiment with the effect of offering flexible working to
women in India, Lisa Ho talks to Tim Phillips about what the results might mean for
the millions of women in India and beyond who would like to work, but don’t.
If you want to do good, and do not have unlimited funds, how do you choose? Which
places, people, and situations are most deserving? Do you invest in economic
benefits or lives saved? Open Philanthropy in an organisation that aims to rigorously
optimise the impact of every dollar it spends. Emily Oehlsen tells Tim Phillips about
its successes so far, and how it still sometimes gets it wrong.
Many of us can recall when we first discovered there were more than a billion people
in the world who lived on “a dollar a day”. This extreme poverty line been effective at
raising awareness of the goals of development. But, if we want to eradicate poverty
rather than describe it, is it a useful tool – and what could improve on it? Charles
Kenny discusses how the line is drawn, and how it could be improved, with Tim
Phillips.
In developing countries, we know comparatively little about how well the elderly cope
with problems like depression and loneliness. There are few policies to support
sufferers, partly because of this lack of data. Maddie McKelway and Garima Sharma
tell Tim Phillips about some of the surprising revelations of a new cross-country
study and suggest ways in which policy can improve the mental health of seniors.
“There’s only so much adapting you can do with so few resources.” That’s a warning
from Asif Saleh, the executive director of BRAC, about the impact of the climate
crisis in Bangladesh. Changes in the climate are causing severe problems already
for millions of the world’s poorest people. A combination of ingenuity and hard work
is staving off disaster for now – but for how long?
How does new evidence influence the beliefs of policymakers, and when do hidden
biases of beliefs lead to bad policy decisions? There is more rigorous empirical
evidence on which interventions work than ever. But that doesn’t translate into better
policy unless a policymaker acts on it. Eva Vivalt and Tim Phillips offer advice to
researchers on how to present their insights.
In both high- and low-income countries, taxes are the main source of government
revenue. They fund roads, schools, and social programmes. But the average tax-to-
GDP ratio in a developing country is less than half of the ratio in the global north.
Oyebola Okunogbe tells Tim Phillips about the innovative ways that many LMICs are
using to collect the taxes that will finance their growth.
Inequality is high in many LMICs, and progressive taxation is a policy tool that would reduce it. But would a personal income tax or a consumption tax redistribute in the same way as in a high-income country? Lucie Gadenne of Queen Mary University of London and the IFS tells Tim Phillips that one of these taxes may be less progressive, and one may be more progressive, than we expect.
In a world of economic nationalism rather than integration, the export-led pathway to
development that transformed China, Vietnam and other countries might no longer
be effective. Instead, Penny Goldberg tells Tim Phillips, policies for poverty reduction
now also need to answer the question of where demand will come from, and that
may require more emphasis on creating a domestic middle class.
Agriculture makes up a large share of employment and GDP in Africa, but crop yields remain stubbornly low. VoxDev has published Issue 2 of Agricultural Technology in Africa, which reviews what the published literature can – and cannot – explain about this stagnation. Chris Udry, one of the editors, tells Tim Phillips about the impact of this stagnation on living standards in Africa, and insights from recent research that can potentially make a difference.
Read the VoxDevLit: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/agricultural-technology-africa
How can we take what we learn in educational RCTs and apply it at scale to many
schools, maybe in many countries? Adrienne Lucas talks to Tim Phillips about the
project she was part of to improve learning in Ghana, the difference between small-
and large-scale trials, and the challenge of implementing policies results without
perfect compliance or daily monitoring.
In high-income countries, we take a reliable electricity supply for granted. But in parts
of the world where that reliable electricity supply isn’t available, what is the effect of
frequent power outages on employment? Justice Tei Mensah of The World Bank tells
Tim Phillips about how power cuts translate to job cuts.
In September 2022 António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, convened the Transforming Education Summit by telling education stakeholders from around the world that education is “beset by inequalities and struggling to adjust to the needs of the 21st century”. Their task: to tackle the global learning crisis by transforming their education systems. Robert Jenkins of UNICEF talks to Tim Phillips about the progress that has been made to solve what he calls “the global learning crisis”.
What determines how a war is fought, and who chooses to fight it? Eleonora Guarnieri of the University of Exeter talks to Tim Phillips about how cultural distance influences whether, and how, sexual violence is used as a weapon of war – and its role in civil conflict in Africa.
If you go to college in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC), how does it help you, and what do you get from it? Two questions that would seem to have obvious answers – but these questions may be more complicated for policymakers to answer than they seem. Jishnu Das tells Tim Phillips that “the demographic dividend seems to be turning into a demographic nightmare” – and what researchers and policymakers can do about it.
Does being rich make us happy, or is it being richer than other people that matters? Will interventions that alleviate poverty also improve someone’s well-being? If we can improve a person’s mental health, does this have an economic effect too? Johannes Haushofer and Daniel Salicath tell Tim Phillips what we know so far about these questions, and how future research can help us understand the psychology of poverty.
Who should select political candidates, the people or the party? Abou Bakarr Kamara and Niccoló Meriggi talk to Tim Phillips about an experiment in Sierra Leone that convinced two major political parties to adopt a primary system for candidate selection. Did that mean that different candidates stood in the election, and that different MPs were chosen?
Photo: Carol Sahley/USAID
Universal basic income – UBI – has always been more an economic thought experiment than serious policy idea. It’s now being taken seriously, but any large-scale implementation would need solid empirical evidence to justify the cost. Tavneet Suri tells Tim Phillips about the surprising insights from the early stages of a decade-long test of UBI in Kenya, and what we expect to learn as the experiment progresses.
The process that economists call labour market dynamics lets workers improve their lives by switching jobs. But do our assumptions about it apply in LMICs? Because if the dynamics are different, then maybe the policies should be different as well. Kevin Donovan and Todd Schoellman tell Tim Phillips about the surprising evidence they discovered about labour market flows, and why it might lead us to rethink job creation policy in LMICs.
The need for humanitarian relief is at record highs, while support from the international community is dwindling. Should we divert funding from development policies designed to deliver growth to focus on the most efficient ways to provide humanitarian assistance instead? And, if we did, what would those policies be? Arif Husain of the UN WFP tells Tim Phillips about the growing funding gap for aid, the urgent need to improve global food security, and the consequences if we choose not to act.
Photo credit: doganmesut - stock.adobe.com
How useful is generative AI in helping entrepreneurs become more successful? Rem Koning is one of a team of researchers who created an AI mentor for entrepreneurs in Kenya. He tells Tim Phillips about which questions the mentor was asked, and which businesses profited from its AI-driven advice.
Mobile money has created many opportunities for users. But its fees can be expensive. One solution: create competition between mobile money providers in Africa through interoperability. But if we reduce the profitability of providers, might it also reduce network coverage, and therefore financial inclusion too? Nicola Limodio tells Tim Phillips about the upside and downside of competition in Africa’s mobile money market.
Recorded at CEPR Paris Symposium 2023: How can macroeconomics (and macroeconomists) contribute to what we know about development policy?
The availability of better data has given fresh impetus to the use of macroeconomic models to explain the development process in LICs. Doug Gollin and Paula Bustos talk to Tim Phillips about this emerging agenda, what questions it is helping to answer, and the challenges of the next generation of research.
What is the role of state capacity in economic development? Nicola Mastrorocco spent five years digitalising civil service records from a century of economic development in the US, showing how a century of bureaucracy changed the US, and what this tells us about how a state bureaucracy evolves.
Research shows that policymakers have consistently endorsed the use of industrial policy. And now economists are increasingly talking about – and researching – the benefits of it too. Dani Rodrik talks to Tim Phillips about what we know about its effectiveness, and the evolving policy agenda that it represents.
How does place-based policy work, and what can it deliver? Gordon Hanson has spent many years studying the economic importance of where people live, and what policy can do to improve those places. He talks to Tim Phillips and what has historically succeeded and failed in US cities, and how that knowledge can be applied elsewhere.
What is the fairest and most efficient way to improve not just access to education, but outcomes too? Should policymakers focus on a broader markets and systems approach to education reform? Emiliana Vegas and Asim Khwaja tell Tim Phillips about what a markets and systems approach to delivering education reform is, and what it has already achieved in Pakistan and Chile.
Researchers want to maximise the development impact of their advice. Stefan Dercon tells Tim Phillips, that to do this, they need to consider the local political constraints and opportunities, and not be “The sort of technocrat that says ‘’nothing to do with me, it’s someone else’s problem’.”
While the news agenda is grabbed by droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, the inexorable rise in sea level is less easy to see. But it will affect billions of people living in coastal regions in our lifetimes. What are the possibilities for, and costs of, adaptation? Allan Hsiao discusses how low-lying cities like Jakarta will cope.
What is the social cost of carbon? What can it tell us about the effects of, and the feasibility of policies to cope with, climate change? Michael Greenstone tells Tim Phillips about how the process of assigning a value to the cost of emissions, and how that can help us to think clearly about the choices we make.
Macroeconomic development policies can be effective to combat poverty. But a lot of research uses smaller-scale RCTs and experiments. Can macro theory and micro empirical research complement one another? Francisco Buera and Joseph Kaboski tell Tim Phillips how this can work in practice, and how it can lead to better policy.
The rapid spread of GVCs has revolutionised the manufacture and supply of … everything. We can point to trade statistics to show that. But what aspects of the relationship between producers and buyers aren’t captured in these statistics? Long-time observers of GVCs Julia Cajal Grossi and Rocco Macchiavello explain to Tim Phillips how supply chains really work.
In developing countries, electricity is still mostly generated from fossil fuels. So how quickly can that change? And what policies are needed to speed innovation in renewables and the transition to using them? John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics and Mar Reguant of Northwestern talk to Tim Phillips.
We tend to discuss changes to the natural environment in big, global numbers. But the impact of those changes is felt in different ways by different people in different places. Tamma Carleton and Reed Walker talk to Tim Phillips about the inequality of environmental damage, and how more detailed data and analysis can help policymakers target their interventions.
Where there are no markets for clean air or drinkable water, can regulation step in? The latest lecture in the Bread-ICG lecture series on environmental economics explored the challenges of environmental regulation in developing economies. Rohini Pande and Nick Ryan talk to Tim Phillips.
When the state is weak, autocratic traditional chiefs control the provision of public goods. If they don’t have the technical skills that these tasks need, can delegation to technocrats or inclusive decision-making improve outcomes? Katherine Casey tells Tim Phillips about the results of an experiment in Sierra Leone.
Policies and commitments to tackle climate change emerge from global meetings and conferences. In our latest episode examining policy for environmental economics in development, Bard Harstad talks to Tim Phillips about how economics can help us make (and stick to) international commitments.
In future we’re going to have to cope with a more volatile climate, but how can we increase the resilience of the most vulnerable communities? An analysis of droughts in the US in the 1950s shows how the financial sector can help communities to adapt to large climate shocks – and what happens when credit is not available. Raghuram Rajan and Rodney Ramcharan talk to Tim Phillips.
In the second of our episodes examining policy for environmental economics in development, Seema Jayachandran and Ben Olken talk to Tim Phillips about how to reduce pollution and increase conservation, while protecting the livelihoods of the global poor.
In the first of a series of episodes that investigates policy for environmental economics in development, Kelsey Jack and Robin Burgess introduce the topic to Tim Phillips, and its implications for adaptation, natural capital conservation, and innovation.
The study of institutions and political power is a strand of development research that in recent years has taught us a lot about – in the name of the famous book – Why Nations Fail, but also what improves their chances of success. James Robinson talks to Tim Phillips about what he and his fellow researchers have discovered, and which directions for future research are the most exciting.
Photo credit: Jeremy Weate
In the last 30 years many governments have attempted to shift service delivery away from a central bureaucracy to local administrations. How well has it worked, and what do we know about the right and wrong way to decentralise? Dilip Mookherjee talks to Tim Phillips. Photo credit: Julien Harneis
Most policies are one-size-fits-all. But in some cases, we can do better. How can we design an intervention that incentivises people to manage their diabetes and hypertension, and does it deliver better results for both the patient and the policymaker? Ariel Zucker of UC Santa Cruz tells Tim Phillips about an experiment to deliver personalised healthcare in India.
Poor air quality is a danger to children’s health, but most of what we know about the effects are from wealthy countries or large cities. A multidisciplinary study has estimated the impact of air quality on child health for many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with surprising policy conclusions. Jennifer Burney talks to Tim Phillips.
The economies of Latin America and the Caribbean are facing some tough economic problems. What policies will improve prospects for people who live in the region? Eric Parrado, Chief Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, talks to Tim Phillips about how IDB puts research into practice.
Multifaceted graduation programmes can permanently change the lives of desperately poor people. But which components of these programs are the most important? And would any of these single interventions work just as well if they were tried on their own? Robert Osei tells Tim Phillips whether individual facets might be sufficient to help people graduate permanently from poverty.
Should the community have a greater say in determining how aid is spent? Participatory development aid has the goal of making sure that governments can’t misuse aid to buy approval. It’s an important idea, but Kate Baldwin tells Tim Phillips that it may be much more complicated in practice than in theory.
The challenge of creating evidence-based policy inspired Arianna Legovini of the World Bank to create an entirely new model of impact evaluation: The Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) group generates operationally relevant data and research that has vastly expanded our knowledge of which interventions work, how they work, and how best to implement them. She tells Tim Phillips how DIME puts research into practice.
Programs that incentivise rural workers to migrate to cities in Bangladesh for seasonal work have been successful. But why don’t more people migrate in this way, and why do some choose not to return to the city? Mushfiq Mobarak tells Tim Phillips about what the researchers discovered when they looked closely at the data, and how that should change policy to encourage migration.
Thinking about development as a ladder is a useful metaphor, but is it true? Can every country climb, or does trade push some countries up the ladder, and some countries down? David Atkin of MIT used this idea as a starting point to investigate the interaction between global trade and development, and he tell Tim Phillips what he discovered.
In the first of a series of podcasts recorded at the PSE-CEPR Policy Forum at the Paris School of Economics, Esther Duflo talks to Tim Phillips about how development economics can respond to the challenges of the 21st century, the link between climate justice and corporate taxation, and why development economics is like cooking a ragoût.
In a world of limited resources, which interventions to help kids learn offer the best value for money? A new report evaluates the evidence and gives some clear policy recommendations about what is, and is not, a policy “smart buy”. Rachel Glennerster talks to Tim Phillips.
Increasing access to education, specifically higher education, can lead to better life chances, particularly for women. But how large is the benefit, and what changes? Ahmed Elsayed talks to Tim Phillips about what we can learn from Egypt’s post-revolution expansion of public university education.
When dictators introduce local elections, more democracy at the local level may mean less control for the rulers. For a time in rural China, elected village leaders implemented government policy, favouring popular policies, while pushing back against those that villagers didn’t like. Nancy Qian tells Tim Phillips how even in a dictatorship, democratic choices can sometimes shape local lives.
When a country’s borders encompass several distinct ethnic groups, how does it create a national identity? A program in Nigeria assigns graduates to different ethnic regions for a year. Does this make them prouder to be Nigerian, and do they give up some of their ethnic identity if that happens? Oyebola Okunogbe talks to Tim Phillips.
How effective are workfare programs at achieving their goals? Do they provide a way for participants to change their lives, or just short-term extra income? Eric Mvukiyehe and Subha Mani have analysed the outcomes of recent programs, and they tell Tim Phillips what workfare does well, and whether the programs sustain their successes.
Public works programs – workfare – are used in many fragile and conflict-affected countries to offer a safety net to poor and vulnerable households. But how large is their impact, do men and women benefit equally, and do they have a wider social benefit? Arthur Alik-Lagrange tells Tim Phillips about the impact of one program in the Central African Republic.
El Salvador’s civil war ended a generation ago, but what is its legacy in the regions that were occupied by guerrillas? The economy can recover, but is there longer-lasting damage to institutions and trust? Mica Sviatschi talks to Tim Phillips about how El Salvador is still divided by conflict.
Better access to childcare may make it easier for women to get jobs outside the home, get better jobs, or make more money doing the job they have already. All desirable outcomes, but how easy are they to achieve? Selim Gulesci talks to Tim Phillips about a J-Pal Policy Insight that pulls together the research on these topics.
If we can provide better employment opportunities for women, in theory that could reduce domestic violence – but strong empirical evidence has been hard to find. Deniz Sanin tell Tim Phillips how government policy to boost coffee exports in Rwanda may have reduced domestic violence and why paid work has this effect.
Zulfiqar Bhutta of the Centre for Global Child Health is one of the global leaders in implementing large-scale public health programs in developing countries. He tells Tim Phillips about what he has learned about working with communities to improve their health, how failure can often be a positive learning experience, and what clinicians can learn from – and teach – economists.
Photo credit: DFID/Russell Watkins
When there’s a successful agricultural extension program, how much of that success is sustained when it is discontinued? How long it takes to change behaviour, and whether change is permanent, can tell us a lot about whether the program is good value. Munshi Sulaiman tells Tim Phillips about a “reverse RCT” in Uganda that tested this question.
Managers often don’t know how much effort their workers are putting into a job. Technology offers a way to solve this problem by monitoring those workers automatically. But do all workers put in more effort when they are monitored? Golvine de Rochambeau talks to Tim Phillips about what happened when Liberia’s truck drivers had GPS trackers fitted to their trucks.
Are fathers more generous to their sons than their daughters? If that investment is in the child’s education and healthcare, then gender-based differences are not just unfair, they give sons a head start in the future. Rebecca Dizon Ross tells Tim Phillips about a new experiment to measure mother-father differences in spending, and to discover why it happens.
Photo credit: Brian Wolfe/flickr
How does trade policy shape foreign direct investment in exporting countries, and how might this affect their structural transformation? Nina Pavcnik tells Tim Phillips about the long-run impact of a bilateral agreement between Vietnam and the US, with some surprising insights into the relationship between trade and job creation. Photo credit: Hien Phung, stock.adobe.com.
The risk that a child will die is lower than it used to be, but in low-income countries it is still not unusual. But how persistent is this in families, and what does this tell us about the causes and consequences of child mortality? Tom Vogl talks to Tim Phillips.
In the 1960s, Brazil’s military dictatorship set out to undermine the power of local political elites by creating local political competition. New research finds that in the regions where the elites were strongest, the policies led to better governance, and more long-run growth. Claudio Ferraz and Monica Martinez-Bravo explain how this happened to Tim Phillips. Photo: Roberto Rocco TU Delft.
How does providing daycare affect infants, their parents, and even their grandparents during the seven years that follow? When Rio de Janeiro held a lottery for thousands of places, David Evans and Lycia Lima were two of a group of researchers who made the most of the opportunity to discover new evidence for the benefits of childcare, and they tell Tim Phillips what they found out.
If women want or need to work outside the home, someone needs to look after their kids. In Mexico, that person has traditionally been the grandmother. But what happens when she’s suddenly not around? Miguel Angel Talamas Marcos talks to Tim Phillips about his research that shows how important grandmothers are to female participation in the labour market.
When FDI mandates joint ventures foreign firms get market access, and their local partners get access to knowledge and technology in return. Does the policy benefit the host economy and its consumers more than other forms of FDI would have done? Jie Bai of Harvard Kennedy School talks to Tim Phillips.
Do healthcare workers in Sierra Leone work harder when they know that promotion is based on performance, rather than friendships or connections? And if they discover that promotion isn’t only unfair but has a big bump in pay, what effect does that have on productivity? Erika Deserranno tells Tim Phillips about an experiment with good news and some warnings for public sector employers.
When Indonesia’s dictatorship became a democracy in 1999, did it affect the investment in healthcare? And was that spending allocated where it was most needed, or where it would win the most votes? Allan Hsiao talks to Tim Phillips about whether, in this case, democracy was a force for good? Photo: Ikhlasul Amal.
In Madagascar, the taxes and duties collected by customs are half of the government’s tax revenue: so the potential cost of corruption is huge. Ana Fernandes and Bob Rijkers are two of a team that developed a new methodology to detect that corruption. They tell Tim Phillips what they found – and what the government did about it.
We naturally assume that maintaining highways helps developing economies to grow and people to thrive. But there’s surprisingly little hard evidence on what the return on this investment could be – until now. Alex Rothenberg tells Tim Phillips whether repairing Indonesia’s roads has been a good investment.
When governments want to raise revenue, they often look for state-owned assets to privatise. What is the effect on the people who work in these firms? David Arnold talks to Tim Phillips about the impact of privatisation in Brazil.
Millions of Sri Lankans have migrated to the Gulf region to work, but almost one in 10 makes a formal complaint to the consulate about abuse or employer malpractice. Is there a better way to protect them? Nilesh Fernando tells Tim Phillips about a successful policy to regulate the agencies that match workers and employers.
Imagine an intervention that combined funding, best practice delivered at scale, and near-universal compliance. Should this guarantee it will succeed? Not necessarily, according to a study of a program to improve quality in Indian schools. Abhijeet Singh talks to Tim Phillips.
What role do bureaucrats play in a crisis? We might think that the best bureaucracy would be made up of people who are very good at doing exactly what they are told. But research into the impact of the 1918 flu pandemic in India suggests that other factors may be important too. Guo Xu talks to Tim Phillips.
What are the consequences for workers if they are employed by a firm that is sanctioned for corruption? We’re back in Brazil: Christiane Szerman tells Tim Phillips that the quest to do the right thing is catching guilty companies – but with devastating consequences for thousands of employees.
Every year, ambient air pollution kills 3 million people, and causes respiratory problems for hundreds of millions more. Can low-paid workers avoid the harmful effects of air pollution without losing income? Bridget Hoffmann and Juan Pablo Rud talk to Tim Phillips about what data from Mexico City reveals.
When workers become unemployed, do some turn to crime instead – and does unemployment insurance make a difference? Diogo Britto and Paolo Pinotti tell Tim Phillips about how disaggregated data gives a powerful new insight on the relationship between job loss and crime.
Does who you vote for influence the chances that you are hired, fired, and promoted? Edoardo Teso tells Tim Phillips about Brazil’s politically polarised labour market.
Almost 2 billion people don’t have access to clean water, which means increased risk of disease, especially for young children. Pascaline Dupas tells Tim Phillips how an experiment in Malawi that provided access to the chemicals to treat dirty water may save lives in many other countries too.
Do policies to provide women with financial resources or financial services give them more economic independence? Less often than we would like, Mikaela Rabb tells Tim Phillips.
If weak states fail to provide order and security, sometimes criminal gangs step in. Can this problem be fixed by targeting resources to the places most in need of help, and what happens when we do? Ben Lessing tells Tim Phillips about a project to do this in Colombia’s second largest city.
By 2030, half the world’s poor will be living in conflict-affected areas. Could some of the resources dedicated to helping them be spent to prevent those conflicts? Thiemo Fetzer of the University of Warwick tells Tim Phillips how providing workfare in India reduced community violence.
For small farmers the most difficult months of the years are the “hungry season” before the harvest. What would be the effect of a small loan at this time? A program in Zambia tweaked the rules of microfinance. Günther Fink and Kelsey Jack tell Tim Phillips about what happened.
In the monsoon season of 2020, 5.5 million people in Bangladesh were affected by severe floods. But the UN was able to help thousands of households by sending them cash before the floods hit. Ashley Pople and Ruth Hill tell Tim Phillips about the situations in which anticipatory transfers might work better than conventional disaster response.
When households escape poverty, how likely is it they will fall back in the future? Loki Phadera of the World Bank and Hope Michelson of the University of Illinois explain to Tim Phillips why measuring resilience can give us a new perspective on how well anti-poverty programs are working – if only we can agree how to do it.
Children in low-income countries are 12 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than those in high-income countries. Cash transfers to households may increase money spent on the health of children – but how large are the outcomes, and should the transfers specifically target child health? Anupama Dathan talks to Tim Phillips.
Which interventions work best, and how can we tweak them to work better? How well could they work in other places, and what changes should we make? Airbel Impact Lab, part of the International Rescue Committee, designs, tests, and scales life-changing solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. Tim Phillips talks to Jeannie Annan and Caitlin Tulloch about their work.
When there is conflict, can outsiders help by creating informal ways for communities to resolve their disputes? Chris Blattman tells Tim Phillips about the long-term impact of a project to do exactly this in Liberia.
How do we encourage small farmers to adopt new types of seeds in LICs? Government agents can help spread the word – but Kyle Emerick of Tufts University tells Tim Phillips that the dealers who sell the seeds might be an under-used resource.
People who live in extreme poverty are increasingly concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected areas. Can a "big push" from the Targeting the Ultra Poor program help? Guadalupe Bedoya and Aidan Coville of the World Bank, and Mohammad Isaqzadeh of Princeton, are part of a team that evaluated the results of an attempt to lift 1,200 households out of poverty in Afghanistan.
If poor people are caught in a poverty trap, a large one-time grant might be life changing. That's the thinking behind programs to target the ultra-poor. But is the impact of this "big push" genuinely permanent? Garima Sharma tells Tim Phillips about the impact of a program in India, 10 years on.
Extreme weather doesn't just ruin one crop: it means that the following year small farmers won't have income to invest. Better seeds and insurance against this sort of bad luck are partial solutions, but what if we combine them in one package? Paswel Marenya tells Tim Phillips about a successful multi-year trial in Tanzania and Mozambique.
Progresa was the groundbreaking and much-copied cash transfer program created by the Mexican government in 1997. Literally millions of children benefited from it. But are they still feeling that benefit? Karen Macours tells Tim Phillips about how a group of economists tracked down the first Progresa generation, and what they discovered.
Research from the Dominican Republic shows that it is more common than we assumed (and more beneficial to both parties) if workers move to another firm in the same supply chain. Cian Ruane tells Tim Phillips why this hard-to-spot effect is important for economic development.
How much do we know about what workfare programs achieve for people who take part? An analysis of one program in Côte d’Ivoire fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge, Patrick Premand tells Tim Phillips.
Entrepreneurs create most of the new jobs in Africa. But can the skills of an entrepreneur be taught, and which skills will be most useful for Africa's young businesspeople? Paul Gertler tells Tim Phillips about a groundbreaking training program in Uganda.
Economists have been arguing about whether openness to international trade creates growth for 250 years. David Atkin tells Tim Phillips about his analysis of the conditions in which increased openness improves welfare in a developing country.
Auditing ensures public procurement is good value. Or does it? An experiment in Chile suggests the audit itself makes procurement less efficient afterwards. Dina Pomeranz opened the black box of the audit process and tells Tim Phillips what she discovered.
Turkey has received 4m refugees from Syria, a quarter of them children. How can its schools integrate so many new students, help them to make friends and to learn a new language? Sule Alan tells Tim Phillips about a program that has successfully built social cohesion in Turkey's schools.
Paraguay, like Peru and Mexico, is supporting seniors with a monthly non-contributory pension payment. What difference does this income make to the people who receive it? Quite a lot, Sebastian Galiani tells Tim Phillips.
Indonesia recently started providing vouchers instead of rice to millions of households. Elan Satriawan of National Team for Acceleration of Poverty Reduction tells Tim Phillips that this has made it possible to target aid better and is cheaper to administer too.
Malnutrition in children is a silent killer. Is it made worse by lack of knowledge or lack of income? Michael Levere tells Tim Phillips about an experiment in Nepal that investigated the best way to help mums-to-be.
In Ethiopia, one development program is building roads to remote villages, while another tries to make small farms more productive. Mesay Gebresilasse tells Tim Phillips how well the projects work individually – and how much more successful they are when implemented together.
In May 2003 the Brazilian government launched an anti-corruption program that exposed and suspended corrupt public officials. Emanuele Colonnelli tells Tim Phillips that the campaign worked – and not just in the districts that were audited.
When courts lack credibility, non-state actors may step in – and the less that we engage with state institutions, the weaker they become. How do we turn this around? Daron Acemoglu tells Tim Phillips about an experiment to inspire more trust in the state among the citizens of Punjab in Pakistan.
In developing countries, more than 90% of children go to primary school. How can we best support their learning? An experiment in India targeted both the times the kids are in school, and the times they are not. Martina Björkman Nyqvist tells Tim Phillips what works -- and what doesn't.
The Mexican government attempted to reduce the effect of extreme weather on people’s lives by establishing FONDEN, a fund to finance recovery and reconstruction. Alejandro del Valle tells Tim Phillips whether it succeeded.
When state repression does its job, does it make us less charitable and less likely to speak our minds afterwards – and, if so, how long does that effect last? Melanie Meng Xue discusses the centuries-long legacy of autocratic rule in China.
In almost every job, in high and low-income countries, women earn less than men. Solène Delecourt tells Tim Phillips about a series of experiments that help explain why male vegetable sellers in Jaipur, India earn more than their female competition – and what can be done about it.
Low-income countries have many small farms, and high-income countries have far fewer large farms and much higher agricultural productivity. Tim Phillips asks Mark Rosenzweig whether developing countries would be better off with bigger farms.
In India, tests intended to evaluate overall student achievement, soon to be rolled out nationally, suffer from massive grade inflation - even though no children or teachers are rewarded or punished based on the results. Ahbijeet Singh tells Tim Phillips why this happens and how we can collect more reliable administrative data in future.
A structural transformation means workers moving to cities for good jobs, or better living conditions for their families, maybe also having smaller families. But these decisions are not made independently: new research examines the trade-off that we make between migration and fertility, and suggests that China's migration and one-child policies may not have been the boost to economic growth that policymakers wanted.
Entrepreneurs in developing countries need access to finance, education, and better institutions. But do they need more marketing? Stephen J Anderson of the University of Texas tells Tim Phillips about an experiment in Uganda that suggests that the answer is yes for both the entrepreneurs, and for economic growth.
There are 420 million young people in Africa today, but 140 million are unemployed, and another 130 million are underemployed or in working poverty. What type of interventions will help them in their search for a good job? Anna Vitali and Imran Rasul tell Tim Phillips about a multi-year experiment in Uganda that reaches some surprising conclusions.
In many conflict situations, should winning hearts and minds be the priority? Information operations are an essential part of military strategy, but so far there have been few systematic evaluations of how well they actually work. Using a new source of data Austin Wright tells Tim Phillips about the success of one such operation in Afghanistan.
Policy to increase tax compliance in developing countries often focuses on enforcement, and that's difficult, unpopular, and costly. Are there other ways to encourage small businesses to pay tax that may be easier and cheaper? Isabelle Cohen worked with the Uganda Revenue Authority to implement a method that raised six times what it cost.
India's caste system traditionally determined which occupation families chose. In modern India, does caste still influence someone's choice of job? Daniel Keniston tells Tim Phillips about the surprisingly complex relationship between caste, work, and India's economic development.
Satellite data from Indonesia shows the damage that out-of-control illegal forest fires, set by farmers to clear their land, do to other people's property and to the environment. Ben Olken tells Tim Phillips how we could reduce this damage by up to 80%.
Politicians can bribe their way to an election win, but in a democracy we throw them out if they perform badly afterwards. Or maybe not: Jessica Leight tells Tim Phillips that vote-buying emboldens corrupt politicians to steal more, and that voters who take the handouts are also less likely to hold them to account.
Low-income countries struggle to collect tax, hurting economic stability, raising debt levels, cutting growth, and gutting basic services. Abebe Shimeles of African Economic Research Consortium tells Tim Phillips about a successful experiment in Ethiopia that also demonstrates the problem of creating sustainable policies to increase tax revenues.
Big infrastructure projects are often dismissed as expensive and problematic. But Yogita Shamdasani tells Tim Phillips how a national roadbuilding program in India has transformed the lives of villagers by making agriculture more productive.
Will a government target spending in places where it thinks it can pick up support in the next election, or target funding to regions that supported it? A new paper analyses election results and local government spending in Ghana. Samuel Obeng tells Tim Phillips whether a political system created in part to defeat cronyism has worked as intended.
When economists talk about the "household", they usually mean a family. But Natalie Bau and Raquel Fernandez tell Tim Phillips that there are many types of family, with many cultural traditions and habits, and these differences can have a big impact on whether well-meaning attempts to improve their lives will succeed or fail.
For half a century Mexico's rural middle-schoolers have attended "telesecundaria" schools, in which they watch their lessons on TV. It saves money and makes sure that kids have qualified teachers. But, Raissa Fabregas tells Tim Phillips, we don't really know if they provide a good education. Until now.
Cities in developing economies can still learn a lot from our urban past, Ed Glaeser tells Tim Phillips. For thousands of years ancient cities have been coping with migration, transport, disease, new technology and land rights -- precisely the challenges that face fast-expanding new cities today.
In rural areas, about half of people who are available for work are not in full-time employment. Most are self-employed. Are they really entrepreneurs, or would they prefer a job and are they just trying to survive? Supreet Kaur tells Tim Phillips about an experiment that suggests unemployment may be higher than we assume.
We often try to improve incomes and financial decision-making of working people by teaching financial literacy. But in Uganda an intervention tested whether learning by saving in a bank account might also be an effective route to knowledge. If this works, Dean Karlan tells Tim Phillips, it might be a low-cost route to financial inclusion.
When the government in Chile attempts to limit which fish can be caught and sold to protect stocks, market traders always find a way around the restrictions. Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak tells Tim Phillips the story of an experiment in how to enforce regulation -- with a surprise finding that could change how compliance works in other industries too.
How can Somalia's schools inspire kids to finish their education and learn about gender equality? A low-cost intervention uses role models with surprising success, says Munshi Sulaiman of BRAC.
When drug-related violence exploded in Mexico, its effects were felt by everyone. Andrea Velásquez tells Tim Phillips how rising violence in Mexico City affected the willingness of people - especially women - to go to work.
Children decide what's normal for girls and boys early in their development. Seema Jayachandran tells Tim Phillips how a program of discussions about gender equality at school can successfully change damaging attitudes to women's rights.
If you want to succeed as a boss, business books tell you, you have to delegate. But we know less than you think about the impact of delegation on productivity and profitability. Namrata Kala of MIT tells Tim Phillips how some Indian SOEs decided to let managers manage, giving us a new insight into the impact of managerial autonomy.
Often we hear exciting news of crop yields from experimental trials, but then the gains don't show up in the real world. Rachid Laajaj tells Tim Phillips how a group of researchers solved this puzzle, and what this means for how we conduct trials in future.
Councilors who thought performance reports would be published before an election invested more in infrastructure, with positive impacts on re-election
Read “Public Information is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections” by Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton here.
The introduction of financial institutions in communities may generate long-lasting externalities, including losses in informal social linkages
Read “Changes in social network structure in response to exposure to formal credit markets” by Abhijit Banerjee, Emily Breza, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, Matthew O. Jackson, and Cynthia Kinnan here.
How automatic payments can help individuals save more and better protect themselves against consumer risks
Read “Learning to navigate a new financial technology: Evidence from payroll accounts” by Emily Breza, Martin Kanz, and Leora F. Klapper here.
Access to fast cash through digital credit may put consumers at risk for over-indebtedness and likelihood of default
Read “Too fast, too furious? Digital credit delivery speed and repayment rates” by Alfredo Burlando, Michael A. Kuhn, and Silvia Prina here.
Bundling interventions that offer parents health information along with cash transfers might yield more sustainable changes in early-life health outcomes for children
Bundling interventions that offer parents health information along with cash transfers might yield more sustainable changes in early-life health outcomes for children
Read “The impacts of a multifaceted pre-natal intervention on human capital accumulation in early life” by Pedro Carneiro, Lucy Kraftman, Giacomo Mason, Lucie Moore, Imran Rasul and Molly Scott here.
Policymakers might seek to address the frictions that prevent potentially beneficial migration to urban areas from taking place
Read “Urban-Rural Gaps in the Developing World: Does Internal Migration Offer Opportunities?” by David Lagakos here.
Despite evidence of increasing household wages, anti-poverty schemes in India can have an adverse effect by lowering human capital investment
Read “Workfare and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from India” by Manisha Shah and Bryce Millet Steinberg here.
People are less likely to ask questions in their communities if it exposes the limits of their knowledge.
Read “Signaling, shame, and silence in social learning” by Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Benjamin Golub, and He Yang here.
More frequent assessment of student performance fails to deliver on improved outcomes when the administrative burden on teachers is high
Nearly a billion people around the world are not connected to the electricity grid, and even more have unreliable access. In this VoxDevTalk, Robin Burgess discusses his paper with Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan in which the authors argue that a social norm that all people deserve access to electricity regardless of payment may actually be undermining the universal access called for in Sustainable Development Goal 7. When people feel no compulsion to pay for the electricity they use, whether or not they are able to, government-owned distribution companies need to ration supply to limit their losses, either by enforcing blackouts or restricting access. This tends to affect those living in the poorer areas of countries more, and research on the relationship between electricity consumption and GDP suggests that it also has a macro impact on economic growth. One possible way to move from this low-payment, low-access equilibrium to a high-payment, high-access one is for governments to provide targeted subsidies towards getting connected to the grid, and for people to then pay for the electricity they use.
Incentivising agent performance is a double-edged sword: while it can encourage agents to perform better, it might also nudge them into cheating and manipulating results to their benefit. In this VoxDevTalk, Guojun He discusses his work with Michael Greenstone, Ruixue Jia, and Tong Liu on this classic principal-agent problem in the context of how Chinese local governments self-report meeting air pollution-reduction targets imposed (and incentivised) by the central government. An analysis of these reports reveals evidence of significant under-reporting by local governments before the central government installed automated real-time pollution monitoring devices across the country. Under-reporting was larger in areas with higher levels of actual pollution, ostensibly since these local governments face greater challenges in meeting pollution-reduction targets. How accurately local governments report pollution figures also has impacts on public welfare, with people exposed to pollution information more likely to search for information on face masks and air filters. Biased information thus prevented people from optimally protecting themselves prior to the introduction of automation.
Certain kinds of NGO-led development projects attract more funding and media attention than others. Child sponsorship or microcredit schemes, for instance, tend to be 'hotter' than rehabilitation projects. To what extent does this knowledge affect the fundraising agenda of NGOs? What causes NGOs to 'cluster' around specific causes in favour of others? And what can be done to diversify NGO (and donor) attention?
In this VoxDevTalk, Thierry Verdier examines the motivations of NGO competition and its impact on the development sector, of which NGOs are a significant part. Competition for funding routinely induces NGOs to systemically undercover 'Cinderella projects', which remain chronically underfunded. Is the solution to this problem better coordination on fundraising activities between NGOs or is it government intervention? In a new research paper, he and his co-authors Gani Aldashev and Marco Marini look at aid data to analyse NGO clustering around certain sectors and geographic regions and propose possible mechanisms that influence such behaviour.
Entrepreneurship across the world is highly male dominated. While the amount of subsistence entrepreneurship in developing countries leads to a slightly more equal gender balance, female entrepreneurs in these countries tend to choose sectors where other women are. In this VoxDevTalk, Nava Ashraf and Ed Glaeser discuss their work with Alexia Delfino investigating how gender norms and weak rule of law put female entrepreneurs at a disadvantage. Fear of expropriation by men leads them to work in less profitable industries, such as tailoring or food production, where they can collaborate with other women rather than with men. A survey of the manufacturing sector in Zambia, for example, revealed that almost all of the gap in earnings between male and female entrepreneurs could be explained by female entrepreneurs entering low-paid industries. Relatively equal gender norms that increase women’s bargaining power and decent rule of law for contract enforcement can encourage more women to become entrepreneurs and to branch out to more profitable industries.
When faced with onerous procedures to apply for a job, potential applicants can be expected to weigh the costs of applying on their time and energy against the probability of their getting the job and the eventual benefits. It is widely believed that if recruiters raise the costs of applying for a job, only the most suited and driven candidates can be expected to apply. In this VoxDevTalk, Stefano Caria shares insights from his paper with Girum Abebe and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, in which the authors start from the assumption that the cost of applying for a job may be higher for the best applicants. Through their field experiment in Ethiopia, they find that employers find better applicants when they reimburse the applicants for submitting their application and appearing for the selection test. Moreover, they are also able to find high-quality candidates from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds who would have been otherwise deterred by the costs of applying.
When workers are supplied to a company through a temp agency, they earn less than the permanent employees they end up working with. Since work place surveys usually do not capture the pay of outsourced labour, there is insufficient data on the pay differential between contract workers and full-time workers. In this VoxDevTalk, Simon Jäger of MIT discusses a new paper where he and his co-authors estimate how much firms differentiate pay premia between regular and outsourced workers. They overcome the above measurement challenge by using a unique, Argentinian administrative dataset, featuring links between user firms (the workplaces where temp workers perform their labour) and temp agencies (their formal employers). They estimate that temp agency workers receive 49% of the workplace-specific pay premia earned by regular workers in user firms: the midpoint between the benchmark for insiders and the competitive spot-labour market benchmark.
Incentivising people to lead healthier lives by means of monetary payments is a simple and cost-effective intervention, but are there ways to tweak that basic incentive contract to make it work particularly well for people who are impatient (those who discount future benefits for immediate gain)? In this VoxDevTalk, Rebecca Dizon-Ross discusses a randomised experiment that varied the design of payment incentives: bundling payments over time meaningfully increased effort among the impatient relative to the patient; in contrast, increasing payment frequency had limited efficacy, which suggests limited impatience over payments.
Relationships between groups are vital in village economies, but do these social structures affect the success of development policies? If resources are delivered by someone from the community, does the social relationship between that agent and the people who could benefit from the success of the intervention matter? In this VoxDevTalk, Oriana Bandiera discusses an experiment in Uganda that addresses these questions. Randomly selecting one of two viable candidates to deliver an agricultural extension programme in rural Ugandan villages, she and her co-authors find that delivery agents favour their own social ties over ex-ante identical farmers connected to the other (unselected) candidate and that this is inconsistent with output maximisation or targeting the poorest. Favouritism disappears when both potential delivery agents belong to the same social group. Using the randomised allocation of the programme across villages, they show how unobserved social structures explain the variation in in delivery rates and programme effectiveness that they often observe in the data.
Across the developing world, many girls face difficulties in persuading their parents to enrol them in secondary education. Whilst financial incentives have often been analysed as a means to encourage female school enrollment, there has been little focus on the role of negotiation skills. In this VoxDevTalk, Kathleen McGinn discusses an innovative experiment in Zambia, which assesses the impact of negotiation skills on female educational outcomes. Fascinatingly, the researchers find that teaching negotiation skills significantly increased female educational outcomes, particularly for high-ability girls.
By 2050, the world’s urban population is estimated to reach nearly seven billion, driven mainly by urbanisation in developing countries. Despite this growth, development economists have often chosen to focus on rural areas. In this VoxDevTalk, Ed Glaeser discusses a new paper that brings together research into urbanisation in the developing world. He argues that policymakers should not try to slow migration into cities, given the benefits of urbanisation that existing research has shown. These benefits include higher productivity and wages over the long-term.
Across the world, women face invisible barriers that prevent them from taking up education and work. This is particularly the case in conservative societies such as in Punjab, Pakistan. In this VoxDev Talk, Asim Khwaja discusses an experiment in Punjab, Pakistan, that assessed the take-up rates of a vocational training programme for women. The researchers found that despite high interest, few women actually took up the programme. This low take-up rate was largely explained by social barriers that prevented women travelling to neighbouring villages (where the trainings were held). However, if group transport could be secured through a male from the village, then take-up increased dramatically.
Editors’ note: This podcast was updated on 25.08.2020
How can policymakers solve the problem of non-payment of utility bills while still maintaining access to water and sanitation services?
In the developing world, urban settings often struggle to provide basic needs, including water and sanitation. Often, the challenge lies in the cost of the last mile between the main infrastructure and individual households. In this VoxDev talk, Paul Gertler discusses an innovative experiment targeted at improving payment of utility bills in slums in Nairobi, Kenya. The researchers find that shaming landlords who failed to pay their bills did not subsequently increase payments. However, a credible threat of cutting water services was enough to ensure that landlords made their utility payments.
Read "Pipe dreams: Enforcing payment for water and sanitation services in Nairobi’s slums" by Aidan Coville, Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler, and Susumu Yoshida here.
Why do trade barriers remain high in developing countries despite the significant potential to drive economic growth through trade?
Advanced economies have mostly removed tariffs and other barriers to trade. By contrast, in many developing countries such barriers remain in spite of the huge potential to drive economic growth through trade. In this VoxDev talk, David Atkin and Amit Khandelwal discuss their new paper on trade in developing economies. They argue that we think about trade policy often through neoclassical models that emphasise perfect competition. Whilst this way of thinking may suit environments in advanced economies, it does not resemble the realities on ground in developing countries.
Read “How distortions alter the impact of international trade in developing countries” by David Atkin and Amit Khandelwal here.
Many development economists have advocated unconditional cash transfers as a crucial tool for reducing poverty, especially during the present COVID-19 pandemic. In this VoxDev talk, Karthik Muralidharan discusses the effects of a small unconditional cash transfer for India’s development goals. He argues that an inclusive growth dividend, pegged at 1% of GDP and paid to all citizens, would have major positive impacts on key development indicators. And crucially, such a transfer is fiscally affordable for India, as opposed to Universal Basic Income, which requires spending of 4-10% of GDP.
Read "An inclusive growth dividend: Reframing the role of income transfers in India’s anti-poverty strategy" by Maitreesh Ghatak and Karthik Muralidharan here.
Can investments in vocational training, contrary to the existing research literature, actually improve labour market outcomes?
Why do we still see high rates of child marriage in settings such as Bangladesh, despite significant improvements in women’s economic empowerment?
How do poor mental health and poverty interact, and how can we best ensure access to mental health services?
How can we best incentivise bureaucrats in a formal manner that avoids concerns over corruption?
Can policymakers speed up the adoption of modern agricultural technologies through peer-to-peer learning?
To what extent do the poorest rural households in sub-Saharan Africa benefit from residential electrification investments?
Do unconditional cash transfers increase welfare in communities as a whole, even within households that do not receive them?
How can governments in developing countries best ensure widespread and effective social protection in light of the COVID-19 pandemic?
How can we best protect the most vulnerable in the developing world during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Whilst rural to urban migration can improve the allocation of labour, can it have unintended consequences on risk sharing in rural communities?
Rickshaw drivers in India who randomly received sobriety incentives as part of an experiment significantly reduced their daytime drinking
Does easing the financial stress of short-term workers by paying them earlier lead to productivity improvements?
Many researchers have suggested that increased sleep at night translates into improved working outcomes, such as higher productivity. But while these researchers have often focused on settings where sleep quality is high, workers in many developing countries suffer from low sleep quality due to factors such as noise, heat, and mosquitoes. In this VoxDev talk, Gautam Rao and Frank Schilbach discuss an innovative experiment that targeted increased sleep among low-income workers in Chennai, India. Fascinatingly, they find that increased sleep at night did not have a positive effect on a range of outcomes including work, decision-making, and health. But can naps at work do the trick?
Why do some countries have high rates of taxation and high compliance, while some failed states have neither?
Why has economic growth stuttered in Mexico despite, on the face of it, implementation of sensible economic policies by successive governments?
Since the 1990s, Mexican governments have done a lot right economically speaking. Inflation has been brought down and the economy stabilised, while exports have also flourished. And yet Mexico has struggled to translate this into significant economic growth. In this VoxDev talk, Santiago Levy discusses his book Under-rewarded efforts: The elusive quest for prosperity in Mexico, which attempts to explain this puzzle. He illustrates that the key to this paradox is the huge productivity differences that exist among Mexican firms.
Some multinationals privately enforce labour standards among their suppliers in developing countries. But is this effective, and does it complement or replace other ways to improve working conditions? Laura Boudreau discusses a recent randomised controlled trial she conducted in Bangladesh to test whether multinational buyers can provide their suppliers in developing countries with incentives to improve compliance with local labour laws. Her experiment exploited a programme by the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a coalition of US multinationals, to enforce a new mandate by the Bangladeshi government requiring factories to establish worker-manager health and safety committees. The intervention by the Alliance significantly improved compliance by local suppliers with the new labour law, which in turn led to a small but statistically significant improvement in indicators of factory safety.
In Mexico in 1996, the extreme poverty rate had climbed above 30%, prompting the government to introduce a poverty reduction programme called Progresa, which turned the conventional wisdom on poverty reduction policies on its head. In this VoxDev talk, Santiago Levy, one of the main architects of the programme that was to become Progresa, takes us back to the 1990s to discuss the creation of the project. He also explains how it managed to avoid the traps that have prevented similar programmes in other countries from being as successful.
Social science research seeks to improve the world we live in. Yet, there is little information on how much political leaders actually value this research when making policy decisions. In this VoxDev talk, Diana Moreira of the University of California, Davis discusses an innovative experiment which took place in more than 2,000 municipalities in Brazil and sheds new light on this topic. The findings suggest that Brazilian mayors not only change their beliefs after evidence briefings, but are also more likely to introduce related policies in their municipalities.
Penny Goldberg is the World Bank’s Chief Economist. This means she manages the research department and is in charge of the research agenda. The World Bank has to continuously evolve to meet its ambitious agenda of eliminating extreme poverty and achieving shared prosperity. Its strength lies in its capacity to produce knowledge and convene policy makers and practitioners. Today, its greatest challenge is transitioning from an organisation that has been traditionally focused on lending to serving as an intermediary between the private sector and governments, conveying policy advice. More systematic collaboration with academia would be useful in making this transition.
On our two year anniversary we asked a few experts to reflect over the last two years of development economics and discuss what they think have been the most important challenges and new evidence. In this VoxDev Talk,Penny Goldberg, World Bank Chief Economist, highlights the trend of becoming more inward looking, and the emergence of new and compelling evidence on how mobile people are when hit by economic shocks.
Editor’s Note: This is part of our 2 year VoxDev anniversary series
On our two year anniversary we asked a few experts to reflect over the last two years of development economics and discuss what they think have been the most important challenges and new evidence. In this VoxDev Talk,Daron Acemoglu, MIT, highlights the slide of democratic and broadly inclusive institutions.
Editor’s Note: This is part of our 2 year VoxDev anniversary series
On our two year anniversary we asked a few experts to reflect over the last two years of development economics and discuss what they think have been the most important challenges and new evidence. In this VoxDev Talk,Bill Easterly, Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute, discusses the backlash against globalisation, and the importance and challenge of conducting research on macroeconomic policies.
Editor’s Note: This is part of our 2 year VoxDev anniversary series
How can we combat the increasing trend that extreme poverty is not only confined to low-income countries, but also to middle-income ones?
Abhijit Banerjee, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT, talks to Tim Phillips about the run-up to 2011 elections in Delhi, India, where residents in a random sample of slums received newspapers containing report cards on politicians. The information was obtained under India’s disclosure laws. The cards presented information on the performance of the incumbent and the qualifications of the two main challengers. Treatment slums saw higher turnout, reduced vote buying, and a higher vote share for better performing and more qualified candidates. Voters assessed whether candidates catered to their interests and compared their performance. Social media can undermine or dilute access to credible information among voters.
Evidence shows that when more women are elected, it changes broader development outcomes due to their differing priorities. Yet women are almost unrepresented in parliaments around the world. In this interview, Lakshmi Iyer reveals to Tim Phillips that in India the challenge is that a woman winning a Parliamentary candidacy election does not see an increase in female candidates in the following election. This is likely due to underlying gender biases in society which even female quotas are unable to mitigate.
Who wins and losses in the technology trade war? John van Reenen (MIT) explains to Tim Phillips why technology transfer in a globalised world isn’t a zero sum game.
Resistance to technology transfer has escalated as the competitive power of China has increased. That being said, China’s growth has benefited the West: It offers a huge market for goods and services, while competition has spurred innovation and stimulated investment. What’s more, trade tariffs will inhibit growth and waste resources. Focusing on domestic innovation, education, human capital accumulation, and unlocking talent is a more productive approach to winning the technology trade war.
Photo: Ivan Walsh/ Flickr
Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus of University of California, San Diego, argue that when we test things at a small scale, they might not be predictive of how they perform at a larger scale.
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How do we get more women in senior positions? Chris Woodruff shares insights from the Bangladeshi garment industry.
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VoxDev's own Editor-in-Chief, Tavneet Suri, drawing insights from her work at J-PAL and VoxDev, emphasises the importance of researchers deeply engaging with, as well effectively communicating the findings of the vast body of existing research to, policymakers.
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Using the example of healthcare in India, Nick O’Donohoe, Chief Executive Officer, CDC, discusses how data plays a crucial role in making sure investments are put to their best use.
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Yasuyuki Sawada, ADB’s Chief Economist, provides insight into Asia’s development and overcoming the middle-income trap.
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Rodger Voorhies, Executive Director of Global Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shares a first-hand account of the importance of empirical analysis for development practitioners
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Development aid by its very nature is provided in messy environments, is often very political and has inherent negative incentives. In such situations, often exacerbated by limited data and imminent deadlines, can we improve how we provide aid? In this interview, Stefan Dercon, discusses the various aspects of aid effectives; the importance of cost-benefit analyses, feedback loops, prioritising the engines of inclusive growth, theories of change, and planning for humanitarian aid.
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In this interview, Robin Burgess discusses three ideas to foster socioeconomic development. First, he discusses how important the quality of civil servants is to development, and his work studying the Indian civil service to identify the key motivators that lead to effective policy implementation. Second, he delves into the causes of poverty. His research in India has shown that contrary to a common school of thought, it is not inherent unproductivity but lack of opportunity that traps people in poverty. Finally, he discusses the idea of electricity being a public good rather than an entitlement, and how this is panning out in Bihar, India.
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Rachel Glennerster discusses her role at DFID, her work on promoting electoral debates in Sierra Leone, the importance of strengthening local institutions, and the challenges of measuring the success of aid programmes. She emphasises the need for aid to involve local partners and focus on addressing pressing needs, rather than being paternalistic.
We lose about 5% of global GDP due to hunger related diseases, and the situation is getting worse with the number of people living in food insecurity increasing. Yet one-third of all food produced is wasted. Arif Husain, Chief Economist at the World Food Programme, discusses a plethora of issues relating to food insecurity; ranging from the main causes - climate shocks and conflict, to the problem of food wastage, to potential policy solutions. He stresses the importance of sustained political will, multi-stakeholder coordination, women’s empowerment, child nutrition and rural-urban connectivity. Finally, he discusses the politics of humanitarian aid and the difficult trade-off decisions that need to be made in its allocation.
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The sustainable development goals have ushered in a new development paradigm. In this interview, Elliott Harris discusses the vision behind the creation of the SDGs and how it differs from that of the MDGs. He stresses the need for sustainable and green development, and engagement with the private sector, which has already begun taking sustainability seriously. He further discusses the challenges of translating goals into policy, financing the goals, measuring progress, dealing with the impact of rising nationalism, and moving away from the traditional top-down approach, as well as progress made thus far.
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The idea that worker utility is affected by co-worker wages has potentially broad labour market implications. In a month-long experiment with Indian manufacturing workers, in her work with Emily Breza and Yogita Shamdasani (Breza et al. 2017) Supreet Kaur establishes the effects of pay inequality on co-workers within production units. They find that pay inequality reduces output, as well as attendance by 10%. Pay disparity also lowers co-workers' ability to cooperate. However, when workers can clearly observe productivity differences, pay inequality has no discernible effect on output, attendance, or group cohesion.
Chris Woodruff discusses the role management practices play in firm growth. Further, he explores different mechanisms for improving firm management in varying contexts across developing countries.
This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that first appeared on the IGC's website.
David Atkin explains why he thinks that globalisation has brought huge benefit to developing countries in terms of expanding their manufacturing sectors and introducing them to new technologies. Retreat from globalisation can have some skill-gain benefit, as young people may stay in education longer if there are fewer low-paid manufacturing jobs on offer to them, but this is a long-term gain and in the short-term the net effect is likely to be detrimental to developing countries. Atkin asks how countries can mitigate the effects and take opportunities to broaden the skills base of their workers.
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Drawing on lessons from Colombia and India, Orazio Attanasio of UCL discusses the roles, pre-existing welfare programmes' infrastructure, and parental behaviour play in effective delivery of early childhood development interventions.
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Male-owned firms earn nearly twice as much profit as female-owned firms. This difference is driven by a variance in the quantity of garments sold, rather than prices charged or costs incurred. Using a firm census and a market research survey, Morgan Hardy and Gisella Kagy (Hardy and Kagy 2017) uncover gender segregation in demand and a gender gap in the market size to firm ratio, suggesting a demand scarcity for female-owned firms.
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How can we increase output per worker in countries like India and China where it is particularly low? Anant Nyshadham discusses one way to do so: by improving the physical work environment. When garment manufacturing firms in India changed their lighting system to a more energy-efficient one, the ambient temperature on the factory floor reduced by 2.5oC. This decrease resulted in an improvement in the output per worker. Moreover, the gains in productivity are five times the energy cost savings the firm is getting from the efficient lighting.
The research in this VoxDev Talk was conducted thanks to funding from the PEDL programme. To know more about the project, please click here.
Building state functionality is difficult, and particularly so in fragile environments marred by weak institutions and political instability. Eliana La Ferrara discusses four methods to overcome the challenges of fragile states.
This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was previously published on the IGC's website.
Ed Glaeser explains why cities are the best pathway to prosperity and outlines three lessons from over 30 years of economics research on urbanisation.
This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was previously published on the IGC's website.
The narrative around Africa has changed over the last decade with it now being heralded as the economic powerhouse of the future. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have laid a solid foundation to their economic growth. However, the next decade will prove crucial in sustaining this growth. To do so, job creation and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are crucial. John Sutton (LSE) discusses why and how African countries should attract FDI.
This VoxDev Talk is taken from a video that was first published by the IGCand is based on an IGC Growth Brief.
John Van Reenen, Professor at MIT Department of Economics and Sloan School of Management, gives a brief explanation of the ways that the current backlash against globalisation emerging in Western countries is likely to affect developing countries, and what measures governments in these countries can take to protect their economies. On the flip side he points out that disruption of global value chains will also lead to damage for companies and consumers in the Western countries adopting an anti-globalisation stance.
Tavneet Suri tells Tim Phillips about the rise of digital credit in Kenya. Who receives digital loans? What the loans are used for? How do they affects the lives of Kenyan people?