VoxDev Development Economics

Afleveringen

1. S7 Ep57: Skipping the factory

   5 november 2026 · 28 min

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   Name a rich country that did not move its farm workers into factories, because Michael Peters says it would be hard to find one. Many years ago, Europe and the US took that road, then Japan and Korea, then China and Vietnam. But when workers in India, Kenya and Ethiopia leave the land, far fewer of them reach a factory. They are more likely to work in shops and restaurants, or sell from a street stall. Lees meer

   Many of these countries, Peters argues, never industrialised in the first place, so there are fewer factories to go to. If services themselves become more productive, perhaps a country can grow without them. But hw do you measure the productivity of services?

   Peters presented the research at STEG's sixth Annual Conference in Nairobi in January 2026. He tells Tim Phillips why a better supermarket in Delhi does little for a rural family, whether a street vendor has a good job or a disguised form of unemployment, and what AI means for countries that hope to export services.

   The research behind this episode

   Peters, Michael, Youdan Zhang, and Fabrizio Zilibotti. 2026. "Skipping the Factory: Service-Led Growth and Structural Transformation in the Developing World." NBER Working Paper 34692, prepared for the Handbook of Development Economics. The authors summarise the research in a VoxEU column, "Skipping the factory: Service-led growth in sub-Saharan Africa."

   To cite this episode

   Phillips, Tim, and Michael Peters. 2026. "Skipping the factory." Conversations on Transformation (podcast).

   About the guest

   Michael Peters is Associate Professor of Economics and Associate Chair of the Department of Economics at Yale University. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He holds a PhD from MIT, and taught at the London School of Economics before he joined Yale. His research spans economic growth, firm dynamics, the long-run effects of migration, and structural change, with a focu…

2. S7 Ep56: Why democracy alone does not build effective states

   4 november 2026 · 39 min

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   Many years ago, Tim Besley (LSE) had a "crazily simplistic" idea to categorise states by their capacity, and in his early work he suggested three groups. When ten years later, he gave an algorithm some data on the measures of state capacity, and left it to categorise states, it also found three groups. Lees meer

   Which states are in which groups barely changes. Does that make a country's group its destiny? In the latest VoxDev Talk, based on his lecture in the IGC-BREAD series on political economy, Besley tells Tim Phillips why it does not. But he also explains why giving citizens the power to vote doesn't necessarily help solve the problems that create weak states.

   The lecture behind this episode:

   Besley, Tim. 2026. "State Capacity, Conflict and Development." Lecture 4, BREAD-IGC virtual PhD-level course on political economy, 29 September. Lecture slides. Watch the recording: [LECTURE RECORDING URL].

   The research behind this episode:

   Besley, Timothy, Chris Dann, and Torsten Persson. 2021. "Pillars of Prosperity: A Ten-Year Update." CEPR Discussion Paper 16256. Gated.

   Besley, Timothy. 2020. "State Capacity, Reciprocity, and the Social Contract." Econometrica 88 (4): 1307-35.

   Besley, Timothy, and Torsten Persson. 2011. Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

   Besley, Timothy, and Torsten Persson. 2010. "State Capacity, Conflict, and Development." Econometrica 78 (1): 1-34.

   To cite this episode:

   Phillips, Tim, and Tim Besley. 2026. "Why democracy alone does not build effective states." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

   About the guest

   Sir Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics and Political Science and W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is known for research spanning political economy, development economics and public economics, with a focus on how governments can design and deliver economic policy more effectively. He served o…

3. Ideas in Development: Ken Opalo on the research Africa needs

   30 oktober 2026 · 46 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DYOzIhbZlI
   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/does-africa-need-development-economics/id1866874059?i=1000793373513
   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3naR6n03DiTzzokWqaJ6cs?si=-CrMmOO1RYi_spJwpm3HNA
   Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8960400-does-africa-need-development-economics
   Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/does-africa-need-development-economics

   If every development economist stopped their research tomorrow, would Africa's growth rate in 2040 look any different?

   Ken Opalo, associate professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and author of the Substack An Africanist Perspective, joins Oliver Hanney to argue that the constraint on African growth is not knowing what to do but knowing how to get it done. He also explains why Kenya's evidence boom has coincided with declining policymaking, and what happens when policymakers outsource their ambitions.

   In this wide-ranging conversation we cover:

   Why the SDGs are the wrong goal for an ambitious minister.

   How narrow evidence reshaped education policy in Tanzania and Kenya.

   The craft of policymaking.

   When a policymaker should actually listen to a development economist.

   How to learn the right lessons from growth success stories.

   What the third wave of philanthropy should fund.

   Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research.

4. S7 Ep55: Armed groups as states: Taxation, security, and civilian support

   28 oktober 2026 · 42 min

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   In parts of eastern Congo, the organisation that collects your taxes, settles your disputes and holds the monopoly on cigarettes is not the state. Lees meer

   Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra (LSE) has spent years investigating how Congo's armed militias work. He tells Tim Phillips how he won the trust of its commanders without building the bomb they requested. He was allowed to see administrative records, and what they reveal about how the group raises and spends its money. He also interviewed recruits and their neighbours to find out who chooses to fight and why. It's a fascinating insight into a system of government that many economists never see.

   The research behind this episode:

   Sanchez de la Sierra, Raul, Louis Dunia, and Hilary Yu. 2025. "Moral Violence: At the Heart of One of Congo's Major Armed Groups." Working paper.

   Henn, Soeren J., Christian Mastaki Mugaruka, Miguel Ortiz, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, and David Qihang Wu. 2025. "Monopoly of Taxation without a Monopoly of Violence: The Weak State's Trade-Offs from Taxation." Review of Economic Studies 92 (2): 1126-56.

   Sanchez de la Sierra, Raul, Kristof Titeca, Haoyang (Stan) Xie, Albert Malukisa Nkuku, and Aimable Amani Lameke. 2024. "The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency." American Economic Review 114 (12): 3976-4014.

   Sanchez de la Sierra, Raul. 2020. "On the Origins of the State: Stationary Bandits and Taxation in Eastern Congo." Journal of Political Economy 128 (1): 32-74.

   Humphreys, Macartan, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, and Peter van der Windt. 2019. "Exporting Democratic Practices: Evidence from a Village Governance Intervention in Eastern Congo." Journal of Development Economics 140: 279-301.

   To cite this episode:

   Phillips, Tim, and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra. 2026. "Armed groups as states: Taxation, security, and civilian support." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

   About the guest

   Raul Sanchez de la Sierra is Associate Professor of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science. …

5. S7 Ep54: Tracking Kenya's tractors

   22 oktober 2026 · 13 min

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   A tractor can plough an acre of Kenyan maize land in about an hour and a half. By hand, it takes a farmer nearly a week. Few smallholders can afford to buy a tractor, so they rent one. The tractor’s owner often lives in town, and employs an operator to drive the tractor to the fields and do business. To minimise risk, the owner keeps their tractor close to home, even when the best work is far away. Lees meer

   Sophie Nottmeyer studied what changed when owners could observe exactly where the tractor was. She used GPS records from about 1,200 tractors fitted with a tracking app from the start-up Hello Tractor, covering close to a million fields, and satellite images of the land they worked. As owners learned to use the app, their tractors travelled further, finding better business opportunities. A year after adoption, they worked about 55 km further from home than in their first month.

   Nottmeyer presented the research at STEG's sixth Annual Conference in Nairobi in January 2026. She tells Tim Phillips what satellites reveal about the fields the tractors reached, and why a fuel subsidy that did the same job would cost hundreds of times more.

   The research behind this episode

   Nottmeyer, Sophie. 2025. "Trac(k)tors of Change: Monitoring, Tractor Mobility and Agricultural Mechanization in Kenya." Working paper, November 2025. A summary is available as a STEG policy brief: "Following the tracks: how digital monitoring expands access to agricultural mechanisation across space" (2026).

   To cite this episode

   Phillips, Tim, and Sophie Nottmeyer. 2026. "Tracking Kenya's tractors." Conversations on Transformation (podcast).

   About the guest

   Sophie Nottmeyer is a Research Economist in the Directorate General of Economic Research at Banco de Mexico. She was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and holds a PhD in Economics from CEMFI in Madrid. Her research spans market access, organisational frictions and informal institutions, and how they inter…

6. S7 Ep53: Implementation science in education: Scaling what works

   21 oktober 2026 · 26 min

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   Nearly every child in a low- or middle-income country now goes to school, but about 70% of 10-year-olds still cannot read or understand a simple text. Researchers have tested ways to fix the problem, and governments want them to work. So why has the needle not moved? Lees meer

   Noam Angrist (Oxford) and nine co-authors argue that the missing piece is the study of implementation itself. In this week's VoxDev Talk, Tim Phillips asks Noam about their framework, just published in Science, that sets out how small tightly controlled experiments can scale to large real-world trials, then into government policy and finally into classrooms.

   As Noam describes, it's not easy to convert good intentions and a clear need to real change. Listen to this week's episode to find out why.

   The research behind this episode:

   Angrist, Noam, Tahir Andrabi, Stefan Dercon, Sharnic Djaker, James Habyarimana, Michelle Kaffenberger, Clare Leaver, Akshay Mangla, Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, and Abhijeet Singh. 2026. "An Agenda for Implementation Science in Education." Science 393 (6816): 1084-87.

   To cite this episode:

   Phillips, Tim, and Noam Angrist. 2026. "Implementation science in education: Scaling what works." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

   About the guest

   Noam Angrist is Academic Director of the What Works Hub for Global Education and a Senior Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He co-founded Youth Impact, an NGO headquartered in Botswana that scales and tests health and education programmes. His research spans the scale-up and implementation of education programmes, global learning data, and A/B testing in the social sector. He led key parts of the education pillar of the World Bank Human Capital Index.

   Research cited in this episode

   Learning poverty. A World Bank measure: the share of children who cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10. A 2022 report by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, FCDO, USAID and the Gates Foundation estimated it at about 70% in…

7. S7 Ep52: Is electricity a weak link in development?

   15 oktober 2026 · 23 min

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   In many cities in low-income countries, the grid fails often enough that businesses keep a diesel generator out the back. So an unreliable electricity grid looks like it is holding poor economies back. In many countries, lenders are putting money behind that idea. Lees meer

   But Martin Shu and his co-authors, Jonathan Colmer and David Lagakos, set out to test it. They assembled data on power plants, fuel, workers and imported generators in 89 countries, and measured how productive each electricity sector was. In the poorest countries, electricity was about three-quarters as productive as in the US — in other words, much closer tot he frontier than their economies. And in the economic model they built using their data, bringing every country up to the world frontier adds only about 1% to long-run GDP.

   Shu presented the research at STEG's sixth Annual Conference in Nairobi in January 2026. He tells Tim Phillips where the productivity gap in electricity lies, why a shoe factory that is better at left shoes than right shoes explains the small gains, and which part of the economy is the real bottleneck.

   The research behind this episode

   Colmer, Jonathan, David Lagakos, and Martin Shu. 2026. "Is the Electricity Sector a Weak Link in Development?" Working paper, January 2026 version presented at the STEG Annual Conference, Nairobi. An earlier version appeared as NBER Working Paper 32041 (2024).

   To cite this episode

   Phillips, Tim, and Martin Shu. 2026. "Is electricity a weak link in development?" Conversations on Transformation (podcast).

   About the guest

   Martin Shu is Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Management and Economics and the Shenzhen Finance Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research spans macroeconomics, development and labour economics, including what household and firm data reveal about structural transformation, and why children in poor countries are more likely to follow their parents into the same occupation. He hold…

8. S7 Ep51: The critical minerals scramble

   14 oktober 2026 · 26 min

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   King Leopold II of Belgium told his envoy in London that he did not want to lose his slice of "this magnificent African cake". The cake was the Congo Free State. Today the Democratic Republic of Congo holds 70% of the world's cobalt reserves, and so the cake is back on the table. Lees meer

   Christopher Adam (Oxford) is one of the editors of a special issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy on the new scramble for critical minerals. The minerals lie mostly in the Global South, and the demand comes mostly from the North. In this week's VoxDev talk, Chris explains why a mining boom may create few jobs, why it might not last, and why hiring the best lawyers could be the smartest way to use an aid budget.

   The research behind this episode:

   Adam, Christopher, Rabah Arezki, and Frederick van der Ploeg. 2026. "The scramble for critical minerals." Oxford Review of Economic Policy 42 (1): 1-13. Open access. The introduction to Volume 42, Issue 1, a special issue on critical minerals.

   To cite this episode:

   Phillips, Tim, and Christopher Adam. 2026. "The critical minerals scramble.” VoxDev Talks (podcast).

   About the guest

   Christopher Adam is Professor of Development Economics at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He is managing editor of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics, a Lead Academic for the International Growth Centre, and a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund. His research spans the macroeconomics of low-income countries, monetary economics and public finance, and growth and structural change, including the response to climate change and natural disasters.

   Research cited in this episode

   Leopold II and the "magnificent African cake". The opening quotes a letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to his envoy in London, in the English translation used by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Leopold went on to rule the Congo Fre…

9. Ideas in Development: GiveDirectly's journey to scale

   9 oktober 2026 · 55 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eCnQy5fF4
   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/givedirectlys-quest-for-scale/id1866874059?i=1000791048981
   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ffbhYkt9bYNiWUc5KPIuZ?si=13787b330c604508
   Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8955404-givedirectly-s-quest-for-scale

   GiveDirectly started out as a small nimble team founded by PhD economists, who had a novel approach to ending poverty – just give cash. But they are no longer the new kids on the block, and have been scaling their operations rapidly in recent years, a trend that could intensify if the third wave of American philanthropy materialises.

   That’s a huge opportunity, but the potential of operating across entire countries is a radically different proposition. So what does an evidence-driven organisation research when it's trying to go from moving millions a year to billions?

   Caitlin Tulloch, Senior Director for Research, Learning and Product at GiveDirectly, joins Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on cash transfers at scale. We cover running a research portfolio like the treasury, the macro forecasting work around a new Malawi project, the trade-off between fraud and reach, building a global emergency response capability, and the politics of putting a lot of cash into someone else's economy.

   Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

10. S7 Ep50: Evidence-based policy: Why one good trial isn't enough

    7 oktober 2026 · 34 min

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    Medicine has run rigorous clinical trials since the 1940s. Development economists borrowed the structure of the trials during the credibility revolution. Chris Cotton (Queen's University) argues that they misunderstood an important part of this revolution. One successful study is not a mature evidence base, and policies built on too little evidence tend to disappoint at scale. Lees meer

    His answer is a framework of Policy Evidence Readiness Levels, or PERLs, just published in Science. PERLs 1 through 4 categorise the weight of evidence behind an intervention, and are inspired by the scale NASA uses to judge whether a technology is ready for a space mission. He tells Tim Phillips which development programmes have already climbed to the top rung, which were implemented at scale on too little evidence (and what happened when they were), and why his framework, by his own admission, is still a modest PERL level 1.

    The research behind this episode

    Cotton, Christopher. 2026. "Rigor Is Not Readiness: The PERL Framework for Evidence-Based Policy." Science 393 (6810): 463-465.

    To cite this episode

    Phillips, Tim, and Christopher Cotton. 2026. "Evidence-based policy: Why one good trial isn't enough." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

    About the guest

    Christopher Cotton is Professor of Economics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he holds the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic and Financial Policy and directs the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy. He is cross-appointed to the School of Policy Studies and the Department of Medicine. His research spans evidence-based policy, the economics of science, education and public health, and how organisations use expertise when they make decisions. He is a co-owner of and research adviser at Limestone Analytics, a policy advisory firm, and has advised on impact evaluation and evidence-based policy for the UK and US governments, the World Health Organization, and others.

    Research cited in this episode

    Evidence-b…

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