VoxDev Development Economics

Dev Patel of Harvard describes Bangladesh as “ground zero for the harmful effects of climate change”. Extreme weather events, particularly floods, are already affecting the lives of millions of people who live there and are making life more difficult for the country’s farmers. He tells Tim Phillips how he harnessed machine learning to create for the first time reliable global data on flooding – an...

In a meritocracy more people can do jobs that match their skills, making them more productive. It’s not just good for them, it’s good for the economy too. So how effective are the policies that try to make countries more meritocratic? Oriana Bandiera and Ilse Lindenlaub tell Tim Phillips how much productivity countries are sacrificing because the wrong people are in the wrong jobs, which countries...

More people die from contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation than from water-related disasters. What are the consequences if we don’t provide safe drinking water, especially for children, and what technologies and policies can accelerate that change? In the first of a series of VoxDev Talks based on J-PAL Policy Insights, Pascaline Dupas of Princeton, also Scientific Director for J-PAL Afr...

Pranab Bardhan of Berkeley has recently published a memoir called Charaiveti: An Academic’s Global Journey. It takes in his childhood in India, and his academic career in the UK, India and the US. The book takes in topics as diverse as whether the questions Marx asked are still relevant today, what economists can learn from anthropologists, what the Chinese government got right (and wrong), and th...

We don’t know much about economic mobility in developing countries compared to the wealthier, data-rich societies which have been the subjects of so much recent research. What does the data tell us so far, and what is important to find out? Debraj Ray and Garance Genicot tell Tim Phillips why measuring upward mobility in low- and middle-income countries is both difficult and important, and what th...

In May 2024 the world’s largest gathering of education and skills ministers took place in London. Tahir Andrabi was there to meet policymakers in his capacity as a member of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP). GEEAP analyses existing research in education to discover which policies are “smart buys” for governments, and which are not. He talks to Tim Phillips to talk about how pol...

Conflict destroys people, communities, and entire economies. If we reduce the amount of conflict in the world, we save lives and reduce poverty. Dominic Rohner of the University of Lausanne tells Tim Phillips about his new book called The Peace Formula, which sets out a different way to prevent and resolve conflict.

It makes sense that vocational training and apprenticeships would be an effective way to help young people find productive work in the global south. But evidence to support this reasonable assumption has been weak, and many researchers find little or no effect. Subha Mani and Neha Agarwal have reviewed the evidence, and they tell Tim Phillips that one type of training shows strong results. It’s ju...

Mothers traditionally provide most of the care for children in early years. What role do fathers play, what difference would it make if they did more, and how could policy incentivise them to do exactly that? David Evans and Pamela Jakiela talk to Tim Phillips about the benefit of involving fathers in early childhood development, but also how adapting parenting programmes to involve fathers isn’t...

Paul Collier has for many years challenged the conventional wisdom of development economics, bringing our attention to the real-world impact of policies many of us take for granted. His new book is called Left Behind. It is about how some countries or regions in the world fall behind, and what we can do to help them recover. In this week’s episode he talks to Tim Phillips about what causes a place...

If women in developing countries want to work, what keeps them out of the labour force? Is it the other tasks they have to do, or the expectations of the people around them? Two new papers experiment with the effect of offering flexible working to women in India, Lisa Ho talks to Tim Phillips about what the results might mean for the millions of women in India and beyond who would like to work, bu...

If you want to do good, and do not have unlimited funds, how do you choose? Which places, people, and situations are most deserving? Do you invest in economic benefits or lives saved? Open Philanthropy in an organisation that aims to rigorously optimise the impact of every dollar it spends. Emily Oehlsen tells Tim Phillips about its successes so far, and how it still sometimes gets it wrong.

Many of us can recall when we first discovered there were more than a billion people in the world who lived on “a dollar a day”. This extreme poverty line been effective at raising awareness of the goals of development. But, if we want to eradicate poverty rather than describe it, is it a useful tool – and what could improve on it? Charles Kenny discusses how the line is drawn, and how it could be...

In developing countries, we know comparatively little about how well the elderly cope with problems like depression and loneliness. There are few policies to support sufferers, partly because of this lack of data. Maddie McKelway and Garima Sharma tell Tim Phillips about some of the surprising revelations of a new cross-country study and suggest ways in which policy can improve the mental health o...

“There’s only so much adapting you can do with so few resources.” That’s a warning from Asif Saleh, the executive director of BRAC, about the impact of the climate crisis in Bangladesh. Changes in the climate are causing severe problems already for millions of the world’s poorest people. A combination of ingenuity and hard work is staving off disaster for now – but for how long?

How does new evidence influence the beliefs of policymakers, and when do hidden biases of beliefs lead to bad policy decisions? There is more rigorous empirical evidence on which interventions work than ever. But that doesn’t translate into better policy unless a policymaker acts on it. Eva Vivalt and Tim Phillips offer advice to researchers on how to present their insights.

In both high- and low-income countries, taxes are the main source of government revenue. They fund roads, schools, and social programmes. But the average tax-to- GDP ratio in a developing country is less than half of the ratio in the global north. Oyebola Okunogbe tells Tim Phillips about the innovative ways that many LMICs are using to collect the taxes that will finance their growth.

Inequality is high in many LMICs, and progressive taxation is a policy tool that would reduce it. But would a personal income tax or a consumption tax redistribute in the same way as in a high-income country? Lucie Gadenne of Queen Mary University of London and the IFS tells Tim Phillips that one of these taxes may be less progressive, and one may be more progressive, than we expect.

In a world of economic nationalism rather than integration, the export-led pathway to development that transformed China, Vietnam and other countries might no longer be effective. Instead, Penny Goldberg tells Tim Phillips, policies for poverty reduction now also need to answer the question of where demand will come from, and that may require more emphasis on creating a domestic middle class.

Agriculture makes up a large share of employment and GDP in Africa, but crop yields remain stubbornly low. VoxDev has published Issue 2 of Agricultural Technology in Africa, which reviews what the published literature can – and cannot – explain about this stagnation. Chris Udry, one of the editors, tells Tim Phillips about the impact of this stagnation on living standards in Africa, and insights f...

How can we take what we learn in educational RCTs and apply it at scale to many schools, maybe in many countries? Adrienne Lucas talks to Tim Phillips about the project she was part of to improve learning in Ghana, the difference between small- and large-scale trials, and the challenge of implementing policies results without perfect compliance or daily monitoring.

In high-income countries, we take a reliable electricity supply for granted. But in parts of the world where that reliable electricity supply isn’t available, what is the effect of frequent power outages on employment? Justice Tei Mensah of The World Bank tells Tim Phillips about how power cuts translate to job cuts.

In September 2022 António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, convened the Transforming Education Summit by telling education stakeholders from around the world that education is “beset by inequalities and struggling to adjust to the needs of the 21st century”. Their task: to tackle the global learning crisis by transforming their education systems. Robert Jenkins of UNICEF talks to Tim Phillips about...

What determines how a war is fought, and who chooses to fight it? Eleonora Guarnieri of the University of Exeter talks to Tim Phillips about how cultural distance influences whether, and how, sexual violence is used as a weapon of war – and its role in civil conflict in Africa.

If you go to college in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC), how does it help you, and what do you get from it? Two questions that would seem to have obvious answers – but these questions may be more complicated for policymakers to answer than they seem. Jishnu Das tells Tim Phillips that “the demographic dividend seems to be turning into a demographic nightmare” – and what researchers and poli...