VoxDev Development Economics

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. But Martin Shu and his co-authors, Jonathan Colmer and David Lagakos, set out to test it. They assembled data on power plants, fuel, wo...

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. Christopher Adam (Oxford) is one of the editors of a special issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy on the new s...

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed , where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eCnQy5fF4   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/givedirectlys-quest-for-scale/id1866874059?i=1000791048981   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/...

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.  His answer is a fra...

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. Justine Knebelmann and Nuriye Melisa Bilgin tell...

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? In this week's VoxDev Talk, Sarah Brierley (LSE) tells Tim Phillips why merit-based hiring is not enough. If politicians cannot choose who g...

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed , where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpOCMtfSF1A   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-brac-partners-with-governments-to-fight-poverty/id1866874059?i=1000788403797   Spotify: htt...

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. In this week's VoxDev Talk Anders Jensen (Harvard Kennedy School) and...

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%.  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 tal...

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. Hugh Cole (City of Cape Town) joined the city government in the middle of the crisis, and has subsequently driven th...

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. 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...

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. 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 bet...

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. 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 answe...

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. 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=100077479894...

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? 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 message...

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed , where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756   Spotify: https://open.spotify.c...

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. I...

If you walk down a street in a low-income country, count the businesses you can see, you will miss many entirely. Someone who cooks at home and sells at the roadside never appears in a registry. What we know about businesses in developing countries has always been incomplete.  In this week's VoxDev Talk, Marcela Eslava (Universidad de los Andes Bogota) talks to Tim Phillips about two decades of re...

A river dries up. The soil turns salty. A harvest fails. Farmers across the developing world feel climate change constantly and personally, they rarely blame their government, or demand action. Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) is one of three authors of a new review of the politics of climate change in the developing world. He tells Tim Phillips that almost all of the existing research on...

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed , where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EacHFVRt9p4   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/has-development-economics-lost-its-way/id1866874059?i=1000775748550   Spotify: https://open.spo...

How many maize seeds should farmers plant in each hole? Ask the farmers and they say two or three. Agronomists can show them more reliable seeds, where they only need one.  But change the seed and everything else changes too; the fertiliser, the spacing, the whole system. This is why getting better technology into the hands of African farmers, and helping them to find ways to improve their profits...

Wars get the headlines. A civil war can wreck a country's economy and dominate its news for a decade. But if you assume war is the most costly form of violence a society faces, you would be wrong. In this week's VoxDev Talk, James Fearon (Stanford) joins Tim Phillips to argue that the violence happening quietly inside homes and on ordinary streets does far more damage than war and terrorism combin...

How do courts work when they work well? You would expect them to be impartial, neutral, and consistent. In much of the Global South that is a tall order.  So when courts fall short of it, are they failing? Development institutions ask states to build strong courts on the North American and Western European model. Good governance follows, they argue. This model treats poorer, less democratic system...

The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed.  In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's parti...

This episode follows a wide-ranging panel convened at Stanford's King Center on Global Development, featuring Gyude Moore, as well as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, former USAID Administrator and Ambassador Mark Green, and Chair and Founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility Vera Songwe -  The future of global development: Approaches and partnerships for a new reality . Bilateral aid...