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S7 Ep57: Skipping the factory
5 november 2026 · 28 min
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…
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S7 Ep56: Why democracy alone does not build effective states
4 november 2026 · 39 min
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…
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Ideas in Development: Ken Opalo on the research Africa needs
30 oktober 2026 · 46 min
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-economicsIf 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.
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S7 Ep55: Armed groups as states: Taxation, security, and civilian support
28 oktober 2026 · 42 min
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. …
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S7 Ep54: Tracking Kenya's tractors
22 oktober 2026 · 13 min
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…
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S7 Ep53: Implementation science in education: Scaling what works
21 oktober 2026 · 26 min
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…
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S7 Ep52: Is electricity a weak link in development?
15 oktober 2026 · 23 min
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…
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S7 Ep51: The critical minerals scramble
14 oktober 2026 · 26 min
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…
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Ideas in Development: GiveDirectly's journey to scale
9 oktober 2026 · 55 min
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-scaleGiveDirectly 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/
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S7 Ep50: Evidence-based policy: Why one good trial isn't enough
7 oktober 2026 · 34 min
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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S7 Ep49: Follow the paper trail
1 oktober 2026 · 21 min
In Uganda, every sale between two VAT-registered firms reaches the tax authority twice. The seller reports it, and so does the buyer. But the two numbers rarely match. In Turkiye, a supplier that installs its first industrial robot doesn’t make an announcement, but the administrative records can track when the firms automate, and what happens next. Lees meer
Justine Knebelmann and Nuriye Melisa Bilgin tell Tim Phillips how they used those records to find out more about the choices firms make, and the effects on the firms around them. Justine and her co-authors worked with the Uganda Revenue Authority to send letters to firms whose reports did not match their trading partner’s, to find out under what conditions the firms amended their tax returns. Nuriye mapped robot adoption across Turkiye's firm-to-firm network, to find out the competitive effects. They also discuss how researchers can access administrative data, and how simply compiling it can change policy.
The research behind this episode:
Almunia, Miguel, David J. Henning, Justine Knebelmann, Dorothy Nakyambadde, and Lin Tian. 2023. "Firm Networks and Tax Compliance: Experimental Evidence from Uganda." CEPR Discussion Paper 18151, revised October 2025.
Bilgin, Nuriye Melisa, Ester Faia, and Gianmarco Ottaviano. 2024. "Technology Spillovers, Diffusion and Rivalry in Firm Networks." CEPR Discussion Paper 19804.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Justine Knebelmann, and Nuriye Melisa Bilgin. 2026. "Follow the paper trail." PEDL (podcast). Centre for Economic Policy Research.
About the guests
Justine Knebelmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Sciences Po, Paris, and an Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Her research spans state capacity in developing countries, tax administration, digitalisation and land. She has worked with tax administrations in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2015.
Nuriye Melisa Bilgin is a Lecturer in Economics at Koç University and a Senior Fellow at the Mic…
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S7 Ep48: How politicians co-opt bureaucrats
29 september 2026 · 27 min
How can we cut corruption in government, procurement that generates kickbacks for local politicians? We could hire officials on merit. Across the developing world, many governments now do exactly that. So why do public contracts still go to political friends? Lees meer
In this week's VoxDev Talk, Sarah Brierley (LSE) tells Tim Phillips why merit-based hiring is not enough. If politicians cannot choose who gets the job, they can often control what happens next: where officials work, and whether they are promoted. This power may be sufficient to co-opt them. In Ghana, where she did much of her research, nearly half of senior local officials say contracts in their district go to firms that fund the ruling party.
The research behind this episode:
Brierley, Sarah. 2026. The Co-opted State: How Politicians' Control Over Bureaucrats' Careers Threatens Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Open access.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Sarah Brierley. 2026. "How politicians co-opt bureaucrats.” VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Sarah Brierley is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research spans the state, corruption, bureaucracy, and election campaigns, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project on political finance in Africa.
Research cited in this episode
Clientelism. Politicians hand out public resources, such as schools, jobs or contracts, in return for votes. Most research assumes that officials simply do what politicians ask. Sarah argues that officials have real control over who gets what, so politicians must first win them over.
Hiring on merit. Sarah checks whether senior local officials in Ghana are hired on merit in three ways: expert surveys, a survey of the officials themselves, and staff records. Of those hired between 2010 and 2016, 67% sat an exam. When the governing party changed a…
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Ideas in Development: How BRAC partners with governments to fight poverty
25 september 2026 · 50 min
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=zpOCMtfSF1A
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-brac-partners-with-governments-to-fight-poverty/id1866874059?i=1000788403797
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lTrMYBVrQkAXoDrIOeEVa?si=Xu5hb5XnQWitnY5NoCmzrg
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8949627-how-brac-partners-with-governments-to-fight-povertyThe ultra-poor graduation approach has one of the strongest evidence bases in development. Almost all of that evidence comes from NGO delivery – but true scale normally means government delivery.
Stephanie Brockerhoff, Director for Programme Design and Impact at BRAC's Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, joins Oliver Hanney to explain why anti-poverty pilots often fall apart at handover, how BRAC partners with governments, and the bottlenecks to scale that remain.
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/
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S7 Ep47: No Taxation without Administration
23 september 2026 · 40 min
Research on how to collect more tax in developing countries has focused on how information, especially administrative data, can help. But in Uganda for example, buyers and sellers report different amounts for the same VAT transaction in 79% of cases. The invoices exist ... but nobody in the tax administration is comparing them. Lees meer
In this week's VoxDev Talk Anders Jensen (Harvard Kennedy School) and Jonathan Weigel (UC Berkeley) argue that information needs an administration that is able to use it. They have examined the research evidence on how tax authorities are organised, who they hire, where they send their staff, and how much freedom those officials get. To maximise revenues they find that many of Max Weber's century-old rules for how to run a bureaucracy still apply, but others often need to bend a little.
The research behind this episode:
Jensen, Anders, and Jonathan L. Weigel. 2026. "No Taxation without Administration: Bringing the State Back into the Public Finance of Developing Countries." Journal of Economic Literature 64 (1): 246-280. The working paper version is available as NBER Working Paper 34729.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Jonathan Weigel, and Anders Jensen. 2026. "No Taxation without Administration." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guests
Anders Jensen is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and research co-director of the State programme at the International Growth Centre. His research spans the rise of modern tax systems, informality and consumption taxes, and how governments with limited capacity can improve tax administration and enforcement. He works with governments in Ghana, Zambia, Liberia and Brazil.
Jonathan Weigel is Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spa…
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S7 Ep46: Rethinking development cooperation: The case for a 'balance sheet' approach
16 september 2026 · 42 min
Many conversations about development for focus on aid: how much, from whom, and for how long. But aid has never been more than a small part of what pays for a country's development, and in 2025 it fell by 23.1%. Lees meer
The need to rethink our attitude to development has inspired the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition (FDCC). In this week's episode, Alexia Latortue and Radha Rajkotia of FDCC talk to Tim Phillips about its first report,. The report assesses the development challenges of LMICs using a balance sheet approach, with assets on one side and liabilities on the other. Tax revenue, remittances, pension and sovereign wealth funds, trade, natural resources and the skills of the population sit on the asset side. Unsustainable debt, illicit financial flows, poor credit ratings, weak institutions, climate exposure and conflict sit on the other.
The idea? Each country focuses on the policies to develop their most important assets, and minimise their most problematic liabilities. They argue that governments and donors alike should stop thinking of developing countries as recipients of aid, and start thinking of them as partners in economic development.
The research behind this episode:
Future of Development Cooperation Coalition. 2026. "The Development Balance Sheet: Rethinking Development Cooperation from the Ground Up." Published 20 May 2026. Research team: Radha Rajkotia, John Norris and Mma Amara Ekeruche.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Alexia Latortue, and Radha Rajkotia. 2026. "Rethinking development cooperation: The case for a 'balance sheet' approach." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guests
Alexia Latortue is Head of Secretariat of the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition and a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development. She served as Assistant Secretary for International Trade and Development at the US Treasury, where she led work on reforming the multilateral development banks and on using public finance…
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S7 Ep45: Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a city's water resilience
9 september 2026 · 38 min
By 2018 the reservoirs supplying Cape Town were down to 20% of capacity. If they reached 13.5%, the city would need to shut down parts of the water network and send residents to collection points to fetch water. That was known as Day Zero, and the rain came just in time to avoid it. Lees meer
Hugh Cole (City of Cape Town) joined the city government in the middle of the crisis, and has subsequently driven the use of data for many aspects of city planning, not just for water. Cape Town now runs its own household survey, works with a private sector partner to measure net migration, and randomises the rollout of water meters so it can find out how they change behaviour. It also runs trials on its electricity subsidy to check whether the money reaches the households it is meant to reach.
Cole tells Tim Phillips how the Day Zero near miss changed how the city's leadership uses evidence, and how other cities can follow the same path.
The research behind this episode:
Abajian, Alexander C., Cassandra Cole, Kelsey Jack, Kyle C. Meng, and Martine Visser. 2025. "Dodging Day Zero: Drought, Adaptation, and Inequality in Cape Town." NBER Working Paper 33468.
Cole, Hugh, Kelsey Jack, Derek Strong, and Brendan Maughan-Brown. 2020. "City of Cape Town, South Africa: Aligning Internal Data Capabilities with External Research Partnerships." In Handbook on Using Administrative Data for Research and Evidence-based Policy, edited by Shawn Cole, Iqbal Dhaliwal, Anja Sautmann, and Lars Vilhuber. Cambridge, MA: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Hugh Cole. 2026. "Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a city's water resilience." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Hugh Cole is Director of Policy and Strategy and Chief Data Officer at the City of Cape Town, where his department covers strategic policy, strategic planning, research and economic analysis. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Econom…
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S7 Ep44: Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained
2 september 2026 · 34 min
In 1978, a farmer in rural China could not sell a sack of grain above the state quota, choose an employer, or move to the nearest city without a permit. Lees meer
In this week's VoxDev Talk, Kaiji Chen and Tao Zha (both Emory University and Atlanta Fed) explain how China dismantled barriers like this one at a time. Gradualist reform first gave farmers the right to sell surplus grain at market prices. Small state firms were privatised 19 years later, while the largest kept state backing. This style of reform powered two distinct growth engines: first, labour moving off the land, then a wave of capital into infrastructure and property. The result: half a century of unprecedented growth -- but it also produced the debt, inequality and trade tension now working against China's growth model.
The research behind this episode:
Chen, Kaiji, and Tao Zha. 2025. "China's Macroeconomic Development: The Role of Gradualist Reforms." Journal of Economic Literature 63 (4): 1331-62.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Kaiji Chen, and Tao Zha. 2026. "Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
About the guests
Kaiji Chen is Professor of Economics at Emory University and a research fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Quantitative Economic Research. His research spans financial contracts, business cycles and China's macroeconomy, with recent work on housing policy, credit allocation and household consumption in China.
Tao Zha is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and executive director of the Center for Quantitative Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017. His research spans macroeconomics, financial economics and econometrics, with a long standing focus on China's economy.
Research cited in this episode
The household responsibili…
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S7 Ep43: Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion
26 augustus 2026 · 35 min
The ballot cast by a landless labourer counts the same as the one cast by the landlord whose fields he works. In this way, democracy can give excluded or subordinate groups access to political power. Lees meer
That's not what has happened, at least, not in large parts of the Global South. Amit Ahuja (UC Santa Barbara) calls those at the bottom of the social order "subaltern groups". Three barriers stand between their votes and any lasting gain. Violence that goes unpunished. The erasure of their shared culture and history by those in power. And they have too little money and organisation to campaign for their rights.
The evidence shows that since 2014 the gains that these groups made in the previous three decades have started to reverse, he warns. The old hierarchies are reasserting themselves.
The research behind this episode:
Ahuja, Amit. 2026. "Subaltern Mobilization in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 391-411. Open access.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Amit Ahuja. 2026. "Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Amit Ahuja is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with research spanning ethnic parties and movements, military organisation, caste, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. His book Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties Without Ethnic Movements won the 2020 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. He co-edited Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State with Devesh Kapur.
Research cited in this episode
Subaltern. The word means "of inferior rank" and was used by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks to describe groups subordinated by a ruling elite. Ahuja gives it three working attributes: a stigmatised identity acquired at birth, disproportionate poverty, and disadvantage that passes from one generation to the next.
Ranked and unranked social orders. Do…
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S7 Ep42: Masculinity norms and their economic implications
19 augustus 2026 · 27 min
Do economists treat what men do as normal human behaviour, and then study norms around women as a departure? If so, we need to pay more attention what we mean by masculinity. Lees meer
That's what Pauline Grosjean (University of New South Wales, CEPR) does. She argues that these masculinity norms carry economic weight of their own. What do men around the world think "being a man" means? The consistent answers: winning against other men, self-reliance, control over women, aggression, and the avoidance of anything coded as weak or homosexual. Grosjean and her co-authors measure adherence to these core dimensions across 70 countries. How do these beliefs vary by age, economic development, and culture? And what do they predict about the way men will behave?
The research behind this episode:
Matavelli, Ieda, Pauline Grosjean, Ralph De Haas, and Victoria Baranov. 2026. "Masculinity Norms and Their Economic Implications." Annual Review of Economics 18:127-55.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Pauline Grosjean. 2026. "Masculinity norms and their economic implications." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guest
Pauline Grosjean is a professor in the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans culture and institutions, gender roles, violence and conflict, and how historical conditions shape economic behaviour long after those conditions have gone.
Research and concepts cited in this episode
Masculinity norms. Social expectations about how men should behave, or how a "real man" should behave. Grosjean draws the distinction from gender-role norms, which define men relative to women. Masculinity norms are largely about how men rank against other men. The five core dimensions measured in the survey are the importance of winning and status, self-reliance and help avoidance, violence, power over women, and avoidance of homosexuality.
Global Masculinity Survey. The 70-country survey behind…
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S7 Ep41: How global supply chains are built
14 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
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 with leading development thinkers. Lees meer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgwcv4fyU28
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-global-supply-chains-are-built-and-how-to/id1866874059?i=1000774798943
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5EECcLVxxEQtkX3gJZcHGH?si=94e15ed7834a4e86
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8922412-how-global-supply-chains-are-built-and-how-to-actually-attract-investment
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/how-global-supply-chains-are-builtBill McRaith spent his career building supply chains – from 1980s Britain, to a factory in Panyu, China in 1990, to Ethiopia three decades later. He joins Oliver Hanney to explain what really attracts manufacturing investment to a developing economy, and why the model most countries are targeting no longer exists.
In this wide-ranging conversation we cover why China’s industry grew; why responsive local governments beat tax holidays; the collapse of the wage gap; how Ethiopia was chosen as a beachhead; and why apparel remains the right first-mover industry for countries not yet on the industrialisation road.
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S7 Ep40: Using mobile phones to support teachers, parents, and students
12 augustus 2026 · 26 min
More households in low-income countries own a mobile phone than have electricity or clean water. So why is education one of the last places it has been put to work? Lees meer
Jenny Aker (Cornell) and Noam Angrist (Oxford) are the academic leads on a J-PAL Policy Insight that reviews 30 studies of mobile phone programmes in education. They tell Tim Phillips that the cheapest option, blasting out SMS messages, is usually the one that fails. But put a real person on the other end of the line, and that's an effective and inexpensive way to improve education. The phone is a platform, Angrist points out, not a pedagogy.
The research behind this episode:
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Leveraging Mobile Phones for Learning." J-PAL Policy Insight. Academic leads Jenny Aker and Noam Angrist; insight authors Jessica Williams and Demitria Wack.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, Jenny Aker, and Noam Angrist. 2026. "Using mobile phones to support teachers, parents, and students." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
About the guests
Jenny Aker is the Daniel G. Sisler Professor of Development Economics at Cornell University. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa. Her research spans mobile technology and agricultural markets, adult literacy and numeracy, financial inclusion, and the design of cash transfers and social protection in Africa.
Noam Angrist is Academic Director of the What Works Hub for Global Education and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and co-founder of Youth Impact, one of the largest NGOs scaling health and education programmes backed by randomised trial evidence. His research spans distance education, the measurement of implementation, and how programmes that work in a trial can be made to work at national scale.
Research and concepts cited in this episode
One Laptop per Child. The plan to put a cheap laptop in the ha…
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S7 Ep39: Ideas in Development: Moving billions to evidence
6 augustus 2026 · 51 min
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=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-evidenceIn 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.
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S7 Ep38: How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work
29 juli 2026 · 30 min
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. Lees meer
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 …
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S7 Ep37: Why businesses stay small in emerging markets
22 juli 2026 · 34 min
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. Lees meer
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 a…
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S7 Ep36: Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries
15 juli 2026 · 30 min
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. Lees meer
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 confli…
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S7 Ep35: Ideas in Development: Has development economics lost its way?
10 juli 2026 · 53 min
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=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-itsWhat 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.
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S7 Ep34: Why farmers struggle to adopt new agricultural technology
8 juli 2026 · 23 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep33: Interpersonal violence costs the world more than war
1 juli 2026 · 30 min
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. Lees meer
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 Ank…
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S7 Ep32: Courts in the Global South
24 juni 2026 · 21 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep31: Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics
18 juni 2026 · 32 min
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. Lees meer
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 …
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S7 Ep30: The end of aid dependency
10 juni 2026 · 23 min
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. Lees meer
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 tha…
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S7 Ep29: What the $1-a-day global poverty line gets wrong
3 juni 2026 · 29 min
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. Lees meer
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 G…
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S7 Ep28: Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works)
27 mei 2026 · 37 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep27: The World Bank's East Asian Miracle
20 mei 2026 · 27 min
In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep26: Ed Glaeser on the perfect city and the demons of density
15 mei 2026 · 37 min
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. Lees meer
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-cityWhat 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.
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S7 Ep25: Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan
13 mei 2026 · 30 min
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? Lees meer
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 instit…
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S7 Ep24: Leonard Wantchekon on youth and governance in African cities
8 mei 2026 · 55 min
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. Lees meer
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-futureAre 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.
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S7 Ep23: How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine
6 mei 2026 · 16 min
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. Lees meer
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. …
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S7 Ep22: Chris Blattman on how organised crime takes over cities
1 mei 2026 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKF3aJ96L2o
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-crime-takes-over-cities/id1866874059?i=1000763970538
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1YGI5Q0LDKRCSK8MHBHfEh?si=5EiiP-vbRnOYxoACBDbE0Q
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8895828-how-crime-takes-over-cities
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/how-crime-captures-a-city
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/chris-blattman-how-crime-takes-over-citiesHow 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/
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S7 Ep21: Boosting farmers' profits
29 april 2026 · 30 min
Decades of agricultural development policy have chased yield. Bigger harvests, better seeds, more fertiliser. But how can we make farming more profitable? Lees meer
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 agricultur…
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S7 Ep20: Argentina’s 2017 tax reform
22 april 2026 · 41 min
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. Lees meer
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 Econom…
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S7 Ep19: Can digital credit unlock investment in smallholder farms?
15 april 2026 · 23 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep18: The complex link between poverty and health
8 april 2026 · 27 min
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. Lees meer
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, wh…
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S7 Ep17: The long shadow of British rule: India's colonial legacy
1 april 2026 · 28 min
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. Lees meer
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 Profess…
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S7 Ep14: Ideas in Development: Raghuram Rajan on AI, India, and service-led growth
27 maart 2026 · 46 min
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. Lees meer
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ideas-in-development/id1866874059
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6sIdIKctE8frdWaz9iyfl2
Everywhere else: https://audioboom.com/channels/5165629-ideas-in-development
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqy-QRDq-vD3YJ2t1rMUwx8BN1WTEA9A
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/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.
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S7 Ep16: The rise and fall of China's overseas lending
25 maart 2026 · 24 min
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. Lees meer
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,…
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S7 Ep15: The rise of digital payments in Latin America
19 maart 2026 · 30 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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S7 Ep13: Ideas in Development: Josh Lerner on the diffusion of technology
18 maart 2026 · 40 min
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. Lees meer
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ideas-in-development/id1866874059
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6sIdIKctE8frdWaz9iyfl2
Everywhere else: https://audioboom.com/channels/5165629-ideas-in-development
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqy-QRDq-vD3YJ2t1rMUwx8BN1WTEA9A
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.
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S7 Ep12: Can contact between groups reduce prejudice?
11 maart 2026 · 23 min
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. Lees meer
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 ex…
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S7 Ep11: Transport policy for economic development
4 maart 2026 · 25 min
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. Lees meer
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 Transp…