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

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-based medicine. The movement that took hold in the 1990s, decades after the clinical trial became standard. Its classic statement is Sackett, David L., William M. C. Rosenberg, J. A. Muir Gray, R. Brian Haynes, and W. Scott Richardson. 1996. "Evidence Based Medicine: What It Is and What It Isn't." BMJ 312 (7023): 71-72. It set out how clinicians should combine the best research evidence with clinical judgement. Cotton's point is that medicine's evidence hierarchy puts systematic reviews above any single trial; the social sciences adopted the trials but not the hierarchy.

Technology Readiness Levels. NASA's nine-level scale for the maturity of a technology, from basic principles observed (TRL 1) to flight proven on a successful mission (TRL 9). It gives engineers a shared vocabulary for readiness without dictating how each component is tested. PERLs borrow the idea and apply it to claims about policy.

The four PERLs. PERL 1 is a hypothesis, backed by theory or observational data. PERL 2 is efficacy, shown in controlled trials under favourable conditions. PERL 3 is targeted adoption, with at least one rigorous causal evaluation under real-world implementation. PERL 4 is generalised guidance, built on systematic reviews that address how effects vary across contexts. Cotton's examples of PERL 4 evidence in development include insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria, cash transfers for school enrolment, and iron and folic acid supplements for pregnant women.

The science of scaling. A growing literature on why promising pilots disappoint at scale; Cotton cites Rasul, Imran. 2026. "From Field Experiments to Policy Interventions at Scale." Science 391 (6790). Much of this work asks researchers to test programmes under real-world conditions. In PERL terms, that moves evidence from level two to level three; Cotton argues it is necessary but not sufficient.

Evidence synthesis organisations. Cochrane produces systematic reviews in health; the Campbell Collaboration does the same for social policy; 3ie, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, funds and synthesises impact evaluations in development. Together with J-PAL's evidence reviews and WHO guidelines, Cotton identifies them as where PERL 4 evidence lives.

Microcredit. Cotton's main cautionary tale. Early pilots produced promising causal evidence under specific conditions, and donors, NGOs, and the media turned it into a claim that microcredit would transform global poverty. The later randomised evidence is summarised in Banerjee, Abhijit, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman. 2015. "Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7 (1): 1-21. Across six countries, the studies found some increase in business activity but no evidence of a reduction in poverty.

The graduation approach. A package of a productive asset, training, coaching, savings, and consumption support for ultra-poor households, first developed by the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC in 2002. The landmark multi-country study is Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Nathanael Goldberg, Dean Karlan, Robert Osei, William Parienté, Jeremy Shapiro, Bram Thuysbaert, and Christopher Udry. 2015. "A Multifaceted Program Causes Lasting Progress for the Very Poor: Evidence from Six Countries." Science 348 (6236): 1260799. J-PAL's Policy Insight now draws on 20 randomised evaluations. Cotton uses it as an example of evidence that matured as implementation expanded.

The reading wars. Cotton's example from outside development. Many education systems adopted whole-language and three-cueing approaches to reading, based on appealing theory and small, heavily resourced studies, and pushed phonics aside. The evidence is reviewed in Castles, Anne, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation. 2018. "Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert." Psychological Science in the Public Interest 19 (1): 5-51.

Quasi-experimental methods. Techniques such as difference-in-differences, which compare changes over time between places or groups that did and did not receive a policy. Cotton argues that macro policies and institutional reforms, which cannot be randomised, can still climb to PERL 3 and even PERL 4 by combining such studies with well-tested theory and the historical record.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

How do policymakers interpret different types of evidence? Eva Vivalt on how policymakers update their beliefs when they see new evidence, and the biases that get in the way.

Rethinking evidence and refocusing on growth in development economics. Lant Pritchett makes the sceptic's case against relying on RCTs and systematic reviews as the main guide to policy.

How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work. Iqbal Dhaliwal of J-PAL on building AI programmes on the existing evidence base, and the scaling problems AI inherits.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

Scaling policy ideas in developing countries, in which John List argues that researchers should generate policy-based evidence before decision-makers commit to scale.

Insights from first generation of microcredit RCTs, from the VoxDevLit on microfinance, which reviews seven randomised evaluations of microcredit programmes.

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 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 Microsoft AI Economy Institute. Her research spans technology adoption, from industrial robots to generative AI, and how new technologies and shocks travel through production networks and global value chains, using large-scale firm-to-firm transaction data from Turkiye. She held postdoctoral positions at Bocconi University and the University of Turin.

About PEDL

Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) is a joint research initiative of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and part of CEPR's Growth Research Platform. Established in 2011, it funds research on private-sector development in low-income countries. Find out more at grp.cepr.org/pedl.

Research cited in this episode

Value-added tax (VAT). Firms charge VAT on their sales and reclaim the VAT they paid on inputs bought from other registered firms. Because every business-to-business sale appears on two returns, one from each side, the tax authority can in principle check one report against the other. Economists call this the VAT's self-enforcing property. In Uganda the VAT raises about 30% of total tax revenue, according to IMF figures cited by Almunia and co-authors; the IMF puts Uganda's VAT compliance gap at around 60% of potential VAT revenue.

Seller shortfall. The Uganda team's term for a transaction in which the seller reports a smaller amount than the buyer. It lowers the tax bill and often signals evasion. In the 10 months before the experiment, from March to December 2017, seller shortfall appeared in 41.4% of monthly seller-buyer observations, and in more than 92% of those cases the seller had not reported the transaction at all.

Almunia, Hjort, Knebelmann and Tian (2024). "Strategic or Confused Firms? Evidence from 'Missing' Transactions in Uganda," Review of Economics and Statistics 106 (1): 256-265. This earlier study measured the scale of the problem. Sellers and buyers reported different amounts for the same transactions 79% of the time, and the authors estimate that unilateral misreporting cost Uganda about USD 383 million in VAT revenue between 2013 and 2016.

Randomising pairs, not firms. In a dense trading network, a letter sent to one firm can reach its partners by several routes and blur the results. The Uganda team randomised at the level of the seller-buyer pair instead, and selected 1,235 pairs so that no two shared a firm. Of these, 741 received letters, sent to the seller only, the buyer only, or both; the remaining 494 formed the control group. Because treated pairs were kept apart in the network, a correction by a firm that did not receive a letter points to communication between the two partners.

The final sales loophole. Sales to consumers and to unregistered firms appear on a Ugandan VAT return as a single total, with no second report to check against. Sellers used this margin. When treated sellers amended their returns to add missing business-to-business sales, they cut their reported final sales by about 60% of that amount. The net gain in VAT was modest, but the letters still raised more than six times what they cost to send.

Electronic invoicing in Uganda. After the 2018 experiment, the Uganda Revenue Authority expanded its data cross-checks. In 2021 it launched EFRIS (electronic fiscal receipting and invoicing), which requires input claims to be matched to VAT invoices, and in 2022 it began rolling out electronic billing machines that record transactions at the point of sale.

The reflection problem. Charles Manski named it in "Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem" (Review of Economic Studies, 1993). When connected firms perform alike, it is hard to tell whether one influenced the other or whether similar firms simply chose to trade together. Nuriye's point about productive firms sorting into relationships with other productive firms is this problem in a supply chain. Her team addresses it by using the precise timing of each first-time robot purchase and checking for trends that predate it.

Knowledge spillovers and product market rivalry. A firm can gain when a partner adopts a new technology and lose when a competitor does. Nicholas Bloom, Mark Schankerman and John Van Reenen set out the difficulty of separating the two effects in "Identifying Technology Spillovers and Product Market Rivalry" (Econometrica, 2013). Bilgin, Faia and Ottaviano separate them by the direction of the link. Suppliers pass gains down to their customers; rivals that sell to the same customers compete them away.

Turkiye's matched firm data. The robot study links VAT returns covering firm-to-firm transactions, collected by the Ministry of Finance, with employer-employee records from the Social Security Institution, customs records from the Ministry of Trade, and registry and balance sheet data from the Ministry of Industry and Technology. The data run from 2007 to 2019. Robot purchases are identified by matching firms' fiscal codes with members of ENOSAD, the Turkish industrial automation manufacturers' association, and imported robots by their customs code, which also records the country of origin and whether an intermediary was involved.

Robot quality and technical support. Robots from Switzerland and Germany, which sell at higher prices than those from China, generate larger spillovers to the adopter's customers. Robots bought through intermediaries that also provide technical support produce the largest effects. Four years after a supplier's first purchase, its customers' productivity is 14% higher when the robot came through an intermediary, against 6.3% when it came from a domestic producer.

Linking surveys to administrative records. Justine mentions separate work by her co-author David Henning, who surveyed Ugandan firms and linked their answers to their tax returns. The combination reveals informal activity that administrative data alone cannot see, including among firms that had left the formal tax system.

Listen next

No taxation without administration: What makes tax authorities work, a VoxDev Talks episode in which Anders Jensen and Jonathan Weigel review the evidence on how tax authorities are organised, staffed and run, and why third-party data has limits where informality is high.

Related reading

Technology spillovers, diffusion, and rivalry in firm networks, a VoxEU column in which Bilgin, Faia and Ottaviano summarise the robot study.

Strategic or confused? Firm behaviour and missing millions in Uganda's VAT, a VoxDev article on the earlier study that showed how often Ugandan sellers and buyers disagree about the same transaction.

VAT in developing countries: flawed, but irreplaceable, a VoxDev article by Anne Brockmeyer, Giulia Mascagni, Mazhar Waseem, Miguel Almunia and Vedanth Nair, which draws on VAT administrative data from 11 countries to show where the tax falls short of its textbook design.

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 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 after the 2008 election, the kind of people hired into professional jobs did not change. The kind of people hired into low-skilled jobs did.

Randomised response technique. A way to ask survey questions that people would rather not answer. Each person rolls a die where the interviewer cannot see it. On one number they must say "yes", on another "no", and otherwise they tell the truth. Nobody knows what any one person meant, but the odds of each roll are known, so the true share of "yes" answers can be calculated across the whole survey. Using this method, Sarah found that 46% of 864 senior officials in 80 local governments say contracts go to firms that fund the ruling party.

Career control tools. Sarah's name for the ways politicians can shape an official's career after hiring: promotions, the work they are given, and where they are posted. Transfers are the main tool in Ghana. Officials who think their mayor can easily move them are more likely to report corruption. In a second survey question, 58% of officials said that exposing misconduct would likely get them transferred.

Whistleblower protection. Ghana's Whistleblower Act, 2006 (Act 720) protects people who report wrongdoing from punishment, including unwanted transfers, and can pay them a reward. But in a small local office it is almost impossible to stay anonymous, so the protection counts for little in practice.

Local electoral competition. Competition between parties at national level is usually good for reform. Sarah finds that close contests at local level have the opposite effect. When seats are won and lost on small margins, campaigns cost more, and politicians have more reason to get money out of public contracts.

India and Indonesia. Both countries hire senior officials through competitive exams. In India, members of the Indian Administrative Service change jobs on average every 16 months, and transfers become more likely when state leadership changes (Iyer and Mani 2012). Proposals to set a minimum time in post have not been adopted. In Indonesia, politicians also interfere in promotions.

Promotion panels. In Ghana's local government service, promotions are decided by panels that include professional officials, so politicians rarely use them as a threat. Sarah suggests using similar panels to approve transfers, so no single politician can move an official at will.

Campaign spending caps. Limits on how much candidates can spend. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have none. India has them, but candidates routinely spend far more (Chauchard 2018). Sarah points to the UK's Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883, which set strict limits that were enforced in court. Total campaign spending fell by 40% between the 1880 and 1885 elections (Rix 2008).

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works). Martin Williams looks at 131 attempts to reform the civil service in six African countries, and why none fully succeeded.

Related reading on VoxDev

Bureaucracy, the VoxDevLit review of the evidence on how officials are selected, paid and managed.

Autonomy, incentives, and the effectiveness of bureaucrats, on evidence from Nigeria and Ghana that civil servants with more freedom complete more of their projects.

Should civil servants be allowed to serve in their home areas? Evidence from India, on what happens when officials are posted close to home.

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: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lTrMYBVrQkAXoDrIOeEVa?si=Xu5hb5XnQWitnY5NoCmzrg 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8949627-how-brac-partners-with-governments-to-fight-poverty 

The 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/

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 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 spans state capacity, taxation, corruption, and the links between religion and institutions. His fieldwork is based mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he runs the research organisation ODEKA.

Research cited in this episode

No taxation without information. Dina Pomeranz's study of Chile's value-added tax showed how the paper trail between firms helps to enforce the tax; each firm has a reason to demand an invoice from its supplier, and the tax authority can use those invoices to detect evasion. Pomeranz, Dina. 2015. "No Taxation without Information: Deterrence and Self-Enforcement in the Value Added Tax." American Economic Review 105 (8): 2539-2569.

Third-party reporting in Denmark. Henrik Kleven and co-authors ran a randomised tax audit experiment in Denmark. Evasion was close to zero on income that employers and banks report to the tax authority, and substantial on income that taxpayers report themselves. Kleven, Henrik Jacobsen, Martin B. Knudsen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, Soren Pedersen, and Emmanuel Saez. 2011. "Unwilling or Unable to Cheat? Evidence from a Tax Audit Experiment in Denmark." Econometrica 79 (3): 651-692.

Missing transactions in Uganda. The 79% figure comes from VAT reports in Uganda, where sellers and buyers declare different amounts for the same transactions. The gap suggests that the tax authority does not systematically cross-check the reports, or that firms act as if it does not. Almunia, Miguel, Jonas Hjort, Justine Knebelmann, and Lin Tian. 2024. "Strategic or Confused Firms? Evidence from 'Missing' Transactions in Uganda." Review of Economics and Statistics 106 (1): 256-265.

The US tax gap. Even a high-capacity administration struggles without third-party data. For tax years 2014 to 2016, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that 55% of income subject to little or no information reporting, such as sole proprietor income, was misreported, compared with 1% of wages and salaries. Internal Revenue Service. 2022. Tax Gap Estimates for Tax Years 2014-2016. Publication 5364. Washington, DC: IRS.

"In developing countries, tax administration is tax policy." The paper's epigraph comes from Milka Casanegra de Jantscher, who co-edited an IMF volume on tax administration with Richard Bird. The line sums up an older policy consensus that building the tax authority matters more than setting the right rates. Bird, Richard M., and Milka Casanegra de Jantscher, eds. 1992. Improving Tax Administration in Developing Countries. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

Weber's ideal bureaucracy. Max Weber described a "rational" bureaucracy with a single chain of command, specialised departments, recruitment by examination, promotion by seniority and decisions governed by rules rather than discretion. Jensen and Weigel use his categories to organise the evidence, and show how developing countries adapt them to local conditions. Weber, Max. 1978 (first published 1921). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The sinews of power. The phrase comes from John Brewer's history of the British state, which credits a professional, specialised Excise Office with raising the revenue that paid for Britain's 18th-century wars. Brewer, John. 1990. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Medium taxpayer offices in Indonesia. Indonesia created dedicated offices for medium-sized corporate taxpayers, which sharply cut the number of taxpayers per auditor. Revenue from the firms in these offices rose by 64% in the short term and by 128% after six years. Basri, M. Chatib, Mayara Felix, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2021. "Tax Administration vs. Tax Rates: Evidence from Corporate Taxation in Indonesia." American Economic Review 111 (12): 3827-3871.

Transfer mispricing and the arm's length principle. Multinationals can shift profits by setting the prices of transactions between their own subsidiaries. Tax authorities test these prices against the arm's length principle, which asks what unrelated firms would have charged each other. Staff in large taxpayer offices must learn to apply it; staff who deal with small firms never need to.

The Pendleton Act. The US Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 introduced competitive examinations for federal jobs, to limit patronage appointments. Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu find that the reform improved public sector performance. Aneja, Abhay, and Guo Xu. 2024. "Strengthening State Capacity: Civil Service Reform and Public Sector Performance during the Gilded Age." American Economic Review 114 (8): 2352-2387.

City chiefs as tax collectors. In Kananga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, neighbourhoods were randomly assigned to property tax collection by state agents or by local city chiefs. Chiefs raised revenue by more than 40%, mainly because they knew which households were more willing to pay. Balan, Pablo, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek, and Jonathan L. Weigel. 2022. "Local Elites as State Capacity: How City Chiefs Use Local Information to Increase Tax Compliance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo." American Economic Review 112 (3): 762-797.

Assigning tax collectors. The same tax campaign randomly assigned collectors to teams and to neighbourhoods. Simulations suggest that pairing the best collectors together, and sending them to the neighbourhoods with the highest revenue potential, would raise compliance by 37% compared with random assignment. Weigel, Jonathan, Pedro Bessone, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek, and John Kabeya Kabeya. 2025. "Supermodular Bureaucrats: Experimental Evidence from the DRC." American Economic Review.

Discretion, technology and bribes. In Ghana, property tax collectors equipped with tablets and digital maps spent less time finding properties and more time deciding whom to revisit; collections rose by 103% relative to the control group. In Tajikistan, electronic filing removed face-to-face contact with inspectors, and firms at high risk of evasion paid more tax, probably because they could no longer bribe the inspector. Dzansi, James, Anders Jensen, David Lagakos, and Henry Telli. 2023. "Technology and Tax Capacity: Evidence from Local Governments in Ghana." NBER Working Paper 29923. Okunogbe, Oyebola, and Victor Pouliquen. 2022. "Technology, Taxation, and Corruption: Evidence from the Introduction of Electronic Tax Filing." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 14 (1): 341-372.

Public goods and tax compliance. Several studies test whether a government can persuade citizens to pay more tax by providing public goods first. In Acayucan, a small city in Mexico, randomised street paving raised property tax compliance. Programmes in Mexico City, Pakistan and Freetown, Sierra Leone, found small or mixed effects. Fernandez, Manuel, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Climent Quintana-Domeque. 2025. "Local Public Goods and Property Tax Compliance: Evidence from Residential Street Pavement." Working paper. Khan, Adnan Q., Asim I. Khwaja, Benjamin A. Olken, and Mahvish Shaukat. 2023. "Strengthening the Social Compact: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan." Working paper.

The demand-driven social contract. Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued that 17th-century English taxpayers agreed to pay more tax in exchange for a greater say in government. In Kananga, citizens in neighbourhoods assigned to door-to-door property tax collection became more likely to attend town hall meetings and to evaluate government performance. North, Douglass C., and Barry R. Weingast. 1989. "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England." Journal of Economic History 49 (4): 803-832. Weigel, Jonathan L. 2020. "The Participation Dividend of Taxation: How Citizens in Congo Engage More with the State When It Tries to Tax Them." Quarterly Journal of Economics 135 (4): 1849-1903.

Procedural justice. Citizens are more likely to accept a state's right to tax when its officials apply the law in a fair, predictable and equal way, rather than arbitrarily or on the basis of personal connections. Margaret Levi and co-authors treat procedural justice as one of the main sources of legitimacy. Levi, Margaret, Audrey Sacks, and Tom Tyler. 2009. "Conceptualizing Legitimacy, Measuring Legitimating Beliefs." American Behavioral Scientist 53 (3): 354-375.

China's administrative model. Wei Cui, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, describes a Chinese tax system that relies less on taxpayer declarations and more on large numbers of decentralised officials who manage individual taxpayers. China has as many local tax offices as post offices, and collects about 20% of GDP in tax. Cui, Wei. 2022. The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Profit shifting: A global challenge hitting developing countries the hardest. Ludvig Wier explains the transfer mispricing problem that large taxpayer offices must tackle, and the tools low-capacity governments can use to detect it.

Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works). Martin Williams studied 131 civil service reforms in six African countries. Of these, 34 tried to link pay to performance; none delivered.

Related reading on VoxDev

Can low-capacity governments work with local leaders to increase tax revenues? Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a VoxDev article by Pablo Balan, Augustin Bergeron, Gabriel Tourek and Jonathan Weigel on the Kananga chiefs experiment.

Improving state effectiveness through bureaucrat assignment: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a VoxDev article on how a tax authority can raise revenue by changing who works with whom, and where.

Taxation and Economic Development, a VoxDevLit that reviews the research on why low- and middle-income countries collect less tax, and what they can do about it.

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 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 to pull private capital into emerging markets. She was previously Deputy CEO and Managing Director for Corporate Strategy at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, sat on the Executive Committee of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and spent ten years at the World Bank working on financial inclusion, ending as Deputy CEO of CGAP.

Radha Rajkotia is Director of Research at the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition and lead researcher on this report. She was Chief Executive Officer of Building Markets and, before that, Chief Research and Policy Officer at Innovations for Poverty Action, running its strategy across 22 countries. She spent eleven years leading the economic recovery and development unit at the International Rescue Committee, on work spanning cash-based relief and job creation in conflict settings. She holds a PhD in Refugee Studies from the University of Sussex, is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Henry Leir Institute at Tufts University, and teaches at Georgetown.

Research cited in this episode

The balance sheet approach. The report sets out assets and liabilities but argues that neither is a checklist. Some entries are country-specific, such as natural resource endowments or exposure to climate risk. Others are structural, such as a sovereign credit rating, which constrains or enables progress regardless of what a government does at home. The point of the exercise is situational awareness before prioritisation, not a universal to-do list.

The 30 national development strategies. The research team reviewed the current development strategies of 30 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. All 30 prioritise economic transformation and human capital. Governance appears as a stand-alone pillar in two-thirds of them. Inequality is a defining element in almost every Latin American strategy and largely absent as an explicit constraint in Africa and Asia. Most countries frame technology as digital economy rather than as AI governance or chip access, which the report reads as a widening sophistication gap.

Nigeria and Ethiopia. The report's worked comparison. Ethiopia attracts more than three times Nigeria's foreign direct investment despite being roughly 100 million people smaller. Nigeria has strong tax revenues, considerable pension fund assets, a heavy debt servicing burden and large losses to illicit financial flows. Ethiopia has a narrow tax base and weak compliance, suffers far less from illicit flows, carries a lighter debt service burden and is nonetheless in debt distress.

Debt as both asset and liability. Low-income countries spend 18% of government revenue on average servicing foreign debt. Angola, Laos, Bhutan, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, the Bahamas, Tunisia, Zambia, Benin and Senegal each spent more than 30% of tax revenues on debt servicing in 2024. As of 2026, 27 countries face a high risk of debt distress and nine are already in it, the majority of them in Africa. Latortue argues that the problem is the price, tenor and currency of debt rather than debt itself, and that restructuring machinery built around the Paris Club has not kept up with a creditor base that now includes China, Gulf states and a large body of commercial lenders.

Credit ratings. Only eight countries across Latin America and Africa hold an investment-grade rating from Moody's, Fitch or S&P. They are Chile, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Botswana and Mauritius. A UNDP analysis cited in the report estimates that flawed ratings have cost African countries as much as $74.5 billion in excess interest and foregone investment, more than the continent's entire net receipt of official development assistance. The African Union is launching its own credit rating agency in 2026.

South-South trade. UNCTAD figures in the report put South-South merchandise exports at about $0.5 trillion in 1995 and $6.8 trillion in 2025. Some 57% of developing-country exports now go to other developing markets. Rajkotia points to the Africa Continental Free Trade Area and to Mercosur as existing infrastructure that could support production integration rather than trade agreements alone.

Demographics. Africa's working-age population is expected to double by 2050, which the report treats as an asset conditional on policy. By 2050 only 26% of the world's population is projected to live in Europe, North America and China, falling to 18% by 2100.

Domestic capital in Africa. Latortue cites more than $4 trillion of assets held across the African continent, a figure that combines central bank reserves, commercial bank assets, institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, pensions and insurance. Her argument is that moving even a small share of it into productive investment would outweigh anything aid can now do. The report notes that Ghana mandated 5% of its pension fund for venture capital in 2025 and that Mexico legislated for an allowance of up to 30%.

Conflict. The one item Latortue places firmly on one side of the ledger. She counts at least 60 live conflicts worldwide. The Peace Research Institute Oslo recorded more conflicts in 2024 than at any point since the Second World War, and more than half of all conflict-affected states now face at least two separate internal conflicts. Development work has a role in keeping the real economy going, she says, but the solutions are political.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

The end of aid dependency. W. Gyude Moore argues that the contraction in aid is structural and that governments should use growth diagnostics to decide which offers of assistance to accept and which to turn down. The closest companion piece to this episode.

Ethiopia's economy: Mamo Mihretu on economic reform and the macroeconomic foundations of growth. The other half of the report's Nigeria and Ethiopia comparison, told by the person who ran the reforms.

Why civil service reform fails and what actually works. Martin Williams on the execution gap that this report identifies as a liability in its own right.

Related reading on VoxDev

Taxation in LMICs, a VoxDevLit edited by Anders Jensen, Anne Brockmeyer and Lucie Gadenne, reviews the evidence on why governments in low- and middle-income countries collect so much less of national income than their richer counterparts.

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 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 Economics. Before joining the city in 2017 he was Director of Country Programmes at the International Growth Centre, running teams in 14 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Research cited in this episode

Day Zero. The term began in the media as the day Cape Town's taps would run dry, then settled on something more specific. It became the day dam levels would hit 13.5%, at which point the city planned to shut down parts of the reticulation network and open water collection points, sequenced so that the most vulnerable communities were affected last.

Dodging Day Zero. Abajian, Cole, Jack, Meng and Visser use municipal billing records to show what the emergency measures did to different households. Before the drought, richer households used twice as much piped water as poorer ones; at the peak of the crisis they used less, partly because they could drill boreholes and substitute private groundwater for the public supply. That eroded the utility's revenue and shifted the cost of supply towards households who could not afford a private alternative, which is why the tariff reform that followed matters as much as the conservation campaign did.

Zonal water balance assessment. Pressure management in the network was one of the two measures Cole credits with the largest effect during the drought, alongside communication with residents. Managing pressure means knowing the boundaries of each pressure zone, and those boundaries had drifted over years of pipes being added and not always recorded. The remapping exercise that followed compares water entering a zone with water leaving it, and it is still going on.

The Green Dot map. During the drought the city published a neighbourhood level map of household water consumption, developed with academic partners including Martine Visser at the University of Cape Town. Households within their usage band showed as a green dot. The aim was peer pressure at street level rather than a citywide number.

The Water, Air and Energy Lab. Launched in March 2024 by J-PAL Africa at the University of Cape Town, the City of Cape Town and Community Jameel, the WAE Lab pairs city policymakers with researchers to run randomised evaluations on clean air, water and reliable energy. Kelsey Jack is its scientific advisor. It is part of a network of J-PAL air and water labs that also includes national and state level labs in Egypt and India.

Free basic electricity. Cape Town subsidises electricity for low-income households, targeted using thresholds on property value and consumption. Because eligibility turns on a cutoff, households just above and just below it are otherwise similar, which lets researchers separate the effect of the subsidy from everything else that differs between rich and poor households. The city funds this transfer from its own budget rather than through National Treasury grant regimes.

Advanced metering infrastructure. The city is replacing water meters with digital ones to improve billing accuracy, revenue recovery and leak detection, and to see whether more frequent consumption information changes what households use. Contractor capacity and budget mean the rollout has to be phased, and the phasing is what makes randomisation possible.

Charging ahead. An earlier Cape Town collaboration with the same origins. Jack, B. Kelsey, and Grant Smith. 2020. "Charging Ahead: Prepaid Metering, Electricity Use, and Utility Revenue." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 12(2). Over 4,000 customers were switched from monthly billing to prepaid meters in a randomised order; electricity use fell by about 13%, and the utility recovered more of its revenue on time.

Non-revenue water. Water that is produced and then lost before it can be billed, mostly through leaks. It is a persistent problem for utilities across the continent, and separating the leak detection effect of new meters from the behavioural effect on households is one of the questions the city wants answered.

Data protection. South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act is the law Cole refers to as the local equivalent of the European Union's GDPR. It governs what the city can share, and it is why partnerships with banks and telecommunications firms on the informal economy are framed around aggregated and anonymised data.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Minibuses, major gains: Rethinking urban transit in developing countries. Lucas Conwell on the privately run minibus networks that Cape Town depends on, and the policy tweaks that would make them work better. Cole describes the city's own minibus taxi reform programme in this episode.

The role of cities in economic development. Edward Glaeser and Diego Puga on why the cities of the developing world are the place to look. Cole quotes Glaeser twice here, so this is the natural next listen.

How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work. Iqbal Dhaliwal of J-PAL on why new technology only helps when it is attached to an existing evidence base.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

Avoiding day zero: Drought and water pricing in South Africa. The authors of the paper set out how private adaptation by wealthy households undermined the utility's ability to cross-subsidise everyone else, and what the tariff reform did about it.

Charging ahead: Prepaid metering, electricity use, and utility revenue. Kelsey Jack and Grant Smith on the Cape Town prepaid metering trial, and what it means for utilities trying to serve low-income customers.

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 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 responsibility system. Piloted in Sichuan and Anhui from 1978 and adopted nationwide by 1980, this reform kept land collectively owned but contracted it to individual households, who could sell output above a fixed state quota at market prices. It replaced work point pay with a direct link between effort and income, and the productivity gains it released freed the rural labour surplus behind China's first wave of industrialisation.

Township and village enterprises (TVEs). Rural, collectively owned firms that absorbed workers leaving agriculture through the 1980s and 1990s, often with local governments acting as guarantors for bank credit the firms could not secure alone. TVE employment grew from 28 million in 1978 to 135 million by 1997, and TVE output rose from under 6% of GDP to 26% over roughly the same period.

The hukou system. China's household registration system, introduced in 1958, ties access to housing, healthcare, education and grain rations to a person's registered location, rural or urban. It made moving to a city without an urban permit practically impossible. Restrictions eased in stages from the late 1990s, and the formal rural urban distinction was removed nationwide only in 2014.

"Grasp the large, let go of the small." The policy, initiated in 1997, under which China privatised or allowed the bankruptcy of small and medium state owned enterprises while retaining state control of the largest, most capital intensive firms in sectors such as infrastructure, energy and real estate.

WTO accession and permanent Most Favoured Nation status. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. From 2002, permanent MFN status with the United States removed the annual threat of tariff spikes on Chinese exports, a stability that Chen and Zha's paper credits with accelerating China's shift from labour intensive exports toward electronics and other capital intensive goods.

The 2009 stimulus and local government financing vehicles. In response to the global financial crisis, China launched a four trillion RMB fiscal package alongside a sharp expansion of bank lending. Much of the resulting infrastructure spending ran through local government financing vehicles, off budget entities set up to borrow for public projects; the debt they built up is now central to China's financial stability risks.

Total social financing. International Monetary Fund. 2026. "People's Republic of China: 2025 Article IV Consultation." IMF Country Report No. 26/044. The IMF's broadest measure of credit in the Chinese economy, the figure Kaiji Chen cites as roughly 315% of GDP in 2025.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

The Four Pests campaign and China's Great Famine, in which Shaoda Wang traces a darker chapter of Chinese economic history, the mass eradication of sparrows during the Great Leap Forward and the millions of deaths that followed.

The rise and fall of China's overseas lending, in which Sebastian Horn explains how China became the developing world's largest bilateral creditor, and why that lending boom has now gone into reverse.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

The Mandarin model of growth, on how China's system of promoting local officials for delivering growth shaped decades of investment led expansion.

How China became the world's factory: Trade, industrial policy, and growth, on the trade liberalisation and industrial policy that took China from export processing to global manufacturing leader.

The bubble dynamics of China's housing boom, Edward Glaeser on the construction surge behind the price rises Chen and Zha describe in this episode.

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 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. Donald Horowitz, in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985; University of California Press, 2000 edition), separates societies where groups sit in a vertical hierarchy from those where they sit side by side. The Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, and Maronite Christians, Sunnis and Shia in Lebanon, compete without one being formally subordinate to another. Hierarchy is not a universal feature of diverse societies.

Greed against grievance. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler argued in 2004 that people join insurgencies to capture resources such as diamonds or minerals; Ted Gurr's Why Men Rebel (1970) argued instead that rebellion follows the gap between what people have and what they expect. Ahuja adds a third answer drawn from ethnography.

The dignity of insurgency. Elisabeth Wood's study of El Salvador (2003) and Alpa Shah's work on Maoist central India (2013) both find that the poor support armed movements partly because insurgents treat them better than landlords and state officials do. Participation confers dignity in a setting built to deny it.

The identity penalty. Devorah Manekin and Tamar Mitts (2022) find that nonviolent campaigns led by marginalised groups attract less popular participation and fewer elite defections than comparable campaigns led by dominant groups. Nonviolence works, but not equally well for everyone.

Undocumented rights. Afro-descendant communities on Colombia's Pacific coast, the San in the Central Kalahari, and Adivasis in India's forests all hold customary claims that colonial and postcolonial registries never recorded. Without a written record they are reclassified; Adivasis became "encroachers" under British forest law and the conservation regimes that followed.

The Dalit Panthers. Formed in western India in the 1970s, the group combined revolutionary politics with armed self-protection for Dalits facing caste violence, taking its name and some of its style from the Black Panther Party.

Military service as a school for organisers. Black South Africans recruited during the Second World War, and Dalits taken into the British Indian Army during the world wars, both emerged with leadership training and a more assertive political style. Dominant groups are usually reluctant to arm subaltern populations; labour shortages force the question.

The Indian Election Commission. Amit Ahuja and Susan Ostermann (2018) trace how the commission secured polling stations through the 1990s and 2000s, which made it possible for parties to bring marginalised voters to the poll. Institutional autonomy, backed by the courts, can partly offset a coercive environment.

Co-optation in Bolivia. Movimiento al Socialismo absorbed parts of the country's Indigenous movement and blunted its radical edge. Alignment with a party brings resources and patronage positions; it can also cost a movement its original demands.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Can contact between groups reduce prejudice? Matt Lowe on why decades of evidence for the contact hypothesis look weaker under preregistration, and why prejudice does not simply fade with development.

Caste, identity, and worker productivity in India Daniel Keniston on how caste still sorts Indians into occupations, and what the economy loses because of it.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

Something to complain about: How minority representatives overcome ethnic barriers, on a formal complaints system in Bihar that gave Scheduled Caste ward members leverage over village heads who were holding up their projects.

How expanding voting rights shaped politics in India. Franchise expansion in 1935 and 1950 barely moved turnout or competition, and yet it shifted public spending towards the newly enfranchised.

No representation without reservation: The long-term limits of gender quotas in India, on what happens to descriptive representation once the quota is withdrawn.

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 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 the review, built on measurement tools developed by social psychologists and run in partnership with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development across its countries of operation, then extended to a further 32 countries. See De Haas, Ralph, Victoria Baranov, Ieda Matavelli, and Pauline Grosjean. 2024. "Masculinity Around the World." CEPR Discussion Paper 19493 (gated).

Male-biased sex ratios in colonial Australia. Grosjean's earlier work uses convict transportation, which left parts of Australia with far more men than women, as a natural experiment. Areas that were historically male-biased show stronger masculinity norms today, more violence and male suicide, and weaker support for same-sex marriage; the last of these puzzled economists, because a shortage of women should, on a supply-and-demand reading, make men more relaxed about other men's homosexuality, not less. See Baranov, Victoria, Ralph De Haas, and Pauline Grosjean. 2023. "Men. Male-Biased Sex Ratios and Masculinity Norms: Evidence from Australia's Colonial Past." Journal of Economic Growth 28:339-96.

Ten to Men. An Australian longitudinal study of male health that measures both adherence to masculinity norms and a range of self-reported violent behaviour. Grosjean cites its strong associations between norm adherence and interpersonal aggression, sexual violence and self-directed harm.

Testosterone and status seeking. The link often assumed to run from testosterone to aggression is, on the evidence, better read as a link to status seeking, with aggression only one of its possible expressions. Testosterone itself responds to social context, diet and caregiving, so it sits inside the culture rather than outside it.

Misperceived norms. Men often overestimate how strongly other men endorse restrictive norms, and also misjudge what women want, believing women approve of controlling or emotionally closed behaviour when they do not. Grosjean links this to Marianne Bertrand's work on men declining paternity leave for fear of others' disapproval, and to the gender-segregated online spaces of the manosphere, where the norms are advertised and reinforced.

School intervention in Brazil. An ongoing trial with Ieda Matavelli comparing two approaches in schools, one closer to cognitive behavioural therapy and one that directly tackles beliefs about what it means to be a man. Matavelli's earlier work documents how warped young men's views of others' expectations can be, and tests whether correcting them changes behaviour.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Non-elite women in politics. Soledad Artiz Prillaman on how patriarchal norms and social networks shape which women can take part in politics, and why a seat count tells you little about power.

Paid work for women and domestic violence. Deniz Sanin on how the spread of coffee mills in Rwanda gave women paid work and, with it, less violence at home.

Related reading

Masculinity norms and their economic consequences, a VoxEU column by the four authors setting out how these norms shape labour markets, health, education, households and politics, with the country and individual-level survey findings.

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=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-built 

Bill 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.

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 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 hands of every child in the developing world, launched in 2005 and abandoned as evidence of its effect on learning failed to appear. Angrist raises it as the cautionary tale for anyone introducing a device: the schools could not absorb it, the software was an afterthought, and nobody planned for charging or breakage. Phones avoid that problem because they are already there, so the marginal cost of adding good pedagogy is low. A long-term follow up from rural Peru found no positive effect on educational outcomes.

Mobile coverage. GSMA. 2025. "The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2025." Around 95% of the world's population now lives within range of a broadband network. In sub-Saharan Africa coverage is about 80% and adoption about 60%, and what people mostly hold is a simple handset rather than a smartphone.

Phone tutoring in emergencies. Angrist, Noam, Micheal Ainomugisha, Sai Pramod Bathena, Peter Bergman, Colin Crossley, Claire Cullen, Thato Letsomo, Moitshepi Matsheng, Rene Marlon Panti, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Tim Sullivan. 2023. "Building Resilient Education Systems: Evidence from Large-Scale Randomized Trials in Five Countries." NBER Working Paper 31208, revised 2025. Weekly maths texts combined with live tutoring calls raised test scores by 0.30 to 0.35 standard deviations at an average cost of US$11 per child. SMS on its own moved the needle only where access to learning was already very low.

Scaling up without the drop. The first Botswana phone tutoring trial produced an effect of about 0.12 standard deviations; by the fifth replication, in Uganda, Angrist says the effect was over 0.8, and implementation fidelity data improved in step with the order of the studies. He sets this against the voltage drop described by John List in The Voltage Effect (2022), the tendency of programmes to lose their punch as they scale. Common, Angrist argues, but not inevitable.

A/B testing the tutoring call. Angrist, Noam, Claire Cullen, and Janica Magat. 2025. "Cheaper (and More Effective) by the Dozen: Evidence from 12 Randomised A/B Tests Optimising Tutoring for Scale." What Works Hub for Global Education Working Paper 2025/001. Roughly half the cost of a tutoring programme goes on scheduling rather than teaching. One call of 40 minutes every fortnight, instead of 20 minutes every week, delivered the same dosage for less. Handing the call to a parent partway through doubled to tripled the effect; motivational nudges to parents did nothing.

Monitoring teachers by phone. Aker, Jenny C., and Christopher Ksoll. 2019. "Call Me Educated: Evidence from a Mobile Phone Experiment in Niger." Economics of Education Review 72: 239 to 257. Weekly calls to the teacher, the village chief and two students raised maths and reading scores. The counter-example comes from Côte d'Ivoire, where nudging parents and teachers at the same time left the most motivated teachers turning up less; too much scrutiny, the authors suggest, corroded the motivation the programme depended on.

Platform and pedagogy. Angrist's phrase for the distinction the review keeps returning to. The phone carries an intervention; it is not the intervention. Targeted instruction and early childhood stimulation both travel down the line, but somebody still has to decide how often to call, who picks up, and what happens on the call. The same traffic makes the phone a good instrument for research, since the data is traceable and the units of randomisation are well powered.

Education Cannot Wait. The United Nations fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises. Its 2022 global estimate put 222 million crisis-affected children and adolescents in need of urgent education support, up from about 75 million in 2016. Angrist uses the same figure in the five-country paper, and cites it here to make the point that the humanitarian structures for education in emergencies exist while the evidence base underneath them barely does.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work. Iqbal Dhaliwal on why One Laptop per Child failed, and what that failure should teach anyone now betting on AI in development.

Why we need to invest in foundational learning. Benjamin Piper on the gap between getting children into school and getting them to read, which is the gap most of these phone programmes are trying to close.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

How simple technologies can improve learning: Evidence from Niger, in which Jenny Aker and Christopher Ksoll show that a weekly call to teachers and students almost doubled the effect of an adult education programme.

Educating children in emergencies: Global evidence from five randomised trials, the five-country evidence on cheap phone tutoring that runs through much of this conversation.

How AI tutors improved learning in Nigeria, on a six-week after-school programme in Edo State that produced large gains in English, and on the guardrails that made it work.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/12UqCmkB4oLLWqoHpT5Lyt?si=6be55d2c81884d65 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8917092-moving-billions-towards-evidence 
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/moving-billions-towards-evidence

In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.

In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.

Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.

A farmer in rural Ghana can use her phone to take a picture of a blighted leaf, upload it, and within seconds she gets a diagnosis that takes account of the soil, the weather, and the other local conditions. Score one for AI. We don't have enough human experts because they are hard to train, and harder still to retain, so apps like this have huge potential. But it doesn't mean they will succeed.

Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director at J-PAL, has watched ambitious tech dreams for development fall apart before. Remember one laptop per child, the plan that failed because schools didn't have technical support, the right lesson plans -- or even electricity? He tells Tim Phillips that AI can succeed, as long as whoever is using it has thought through the theory of change, designs for impact rather than downloads, and can scale up successful experiments. J-PAL has launched the AI Evidence Playbook to help policymakers solve these knotty problems.

The research behind this episode

Dhaliwal, Iqbal, Sam Carter, Attaullah Abbasi, and Audrey Lorvo. 2026. AI Evidence Playbook: A Practical Guide. Cambridge, MA: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

To cite this episode

Phillips, Tim, and Iqbal Dhaliwal. 2026. "How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

About the guest

Iqbal Dhaliwal is global executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), based at MIT, and co-chairs Project AI Evidence. He co-directs J-PAL's South Asia office with Esther Duflo. Before joining J-PAL in 2009 he served in the Indian Administrative Service, where he ran a statewide welfare department and led a public company, delivering large-scale programmes in the field. His work spans the design, evaluation, and scale-up of anti-poverty programmes, and the question of when a technology genuinely changes lives rather than dashboards.

Research and concepts cited in this episode

Project AI Evidence (PAIE) is J-PAL's initiative to identify, evaluate, and scale applications of AI for social good, and to scale down those that may cause harm. The AI Evidence Playbook is its practical output, a reference for policymakers, practitioners, and donors weighing whether and how to adopt AI-enabled programmes.

The six pathways. The playbook groups two decades of development evidence into six areas where AI could raise impact or cut cost: improving needs prediction and targeting; increasing access to personalised, timely support; maximising the effectiveness of frontline service providers; improving organisational and programmatic efficiency; reducing bias and ensuring fairness; and boosting government resource mobilisation, including more progressive taxation.

Machine learning targeting in Togo. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Togo's government wanted to reach its poorest households but lacked the administrative data to find them. Researchers used satellite imagery to identify likely-poor neighbourhoods from features such as house size and roof quality, then paired it with mobile phone records to narrow down poorer individuals within them; a practical, rapid way to fill a data gap without a social registry.

Theory of change. The sequence of steps connecting an input to a final outcome. Dhaliwal's point is that most people hold an optimistic hypothesis rather than a theory of change: the inputs and the hoped-for outcome are clear, but the intermediary links, adoption, trust, workflows, repair, are missing. Writing it on paper is where the gaps show.

Design for impact, design for scale. Engagement numbers and downloads are a first step, not proof of impact. Designing for scale means designing for a farmer who may lack a device, may lack reliable connectivity, and may not trust the technology without the extension worker they have known for fifteen years.

One laptop per child, and smokeless stoves. Dhaliwal raises both as technologies whose theory of change was sound but whose delivery was not thought through: the school system could not absorb the laptop, the electricity and connectivity were not there, and no one planned for breakage. The relevant cautionary parallel for AI, whose problems he argues are not just inherited but exacerbated by the pace of change.

Global knowledge, local context. Dhaliwal separates rules that can be changed from genuine context differences. A programme that works in India but "won't work in Ghana" because teachers there work six hours rather than six hours fifteen minutes is a rule problem, and solvable. A classroom of 1:20 versus 1:60 is a real contextual difference worth worrying about.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

The development economics of AI: Lessons and questions. Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa take stock of what an entire series of conversations revealed about where AI helps in development, and where the evidence runs thin.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

AI and development economics: Early evidence and how to keep up, a running VoxDev reading list on the impacts of AI in low- and middle-income countries that includes J-PAL's AI Evidence Playbook among its resources.

If you walk down a street in a low-income country, count the businesses you can see, you will miss many entirely. Someone who cooks at home and sells at the roadside never appears in a registry. What we know about businesses in developing countries has always been incomplete. 

In this week's VoxDev Talk, Marcela Eslava (Universidad de los Andes Bogota) talks to Tim Phillips about two decades of research into why firms in developing economies stay small, grow slowly, and rarely break through. A worker in a developing economy is about three times more likely to be running, or working in, one of these very small businesses than a worker in a high income economy, and far more likely to be self-employed, a one-person firm. 

Weaker human capital and less access to technology make it harder to start a business. Costlier credit, labour regulation that makes it difficult and expensive to employ staff, and taxes on formal firms make it harder to grow. Some of these distortions are even introduced by well-meaning policymakers, such as low taxes for small firms - which then effectively tax growth.

The research behind this episode:

Eslava, Marcela. 2026. "Firm Size and Dynamics in Less-Developed Economies." Annual Review of Economics, volume 18. Review in advance; changes may still occur before final publication.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Marcela Eslava. 2026. "Why businesses stay small in emerging markets." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

About the guest

Marcela Eslava is Professor of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota¡, and President of the Latin American and the Caribbean Economic Association. Her research spans firm dynamics, productivity and demand at the firm level, labour informality, credit constraints, and the regulations that shape how businesses grow in developing economies.

Research cited in this episode

The Lucas-Hopenhayn framework. The workhorse model of firm dynamics, built on Robert Lucas's 1978 account of occupational choice and Hugo Hopenhayn's 1992 model of entry and exit; it links the size of the average firm to the productivity of potential entrepreneurs and to distortions that stop the most efficient firms from scaling. Eslava's review extends it to explain why firms are smaller in poorer economies.

Nonemployers and micro employers. Own-account and self-employed workers plus the smallest employers; in Eslava and co-authors' sample of 51 economies they account for over 90% of employment in lower-middle-income economies and around 20% in the United States. Their dominance is the main reason average firm size is so low in poorer countries.

Correlated distortions. Taxes, regulations and credit frictions that fall more heavily on high-productivity firms; because they hold back the firms that should be growing, they push labour towards less productive businesses and drag down aggregate output. They show up in the models as residuals, the part of the size gap that productivity and quality cannot explain.

Size-dependent policies. Rules that switch on above an employment threshold, such as the extra workplace obligations that apply to firms above 50 employees in France, or above 20 in Peru; Eslava describes comparing firms just above and just below a threshold as one way to prise open the black box of distortions and measure what a specific rule does.

Demand versus cost efficiency. Work on Colombian manufacturing decomposing a firm's success into technical efficiency and the appeal of its products; the demand side contributes many times more to differences in revenue than cost efficiency does. Eslava's point is that trimming costs buys survival, while product quality and market access drive real growth.

The data-coverage puzzle. Early firm-level studies found average firm size falling as countries got richer, the reverse of what later work established; the anomaly came from datasets that captured only the large, registered firms in poor economies and missed the vast base of tiny ones. Better censuses, and household and employment surveys that count people rather than firms, corrected the picture.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

What have we learned about the informal sector? Gabriel Ulyssea and Mariaflavia Harari on the causes and consequences of informality, the close cousin of micro-enterprise that runs through this conversation.

Related reading on VoxDev

Can variation in firm growth explain the development gap? Colombia vs the US, by Marcela Eslava, John Haltiwanger and Alvaro Pinzón, on how a deficit of superstar plants and an excess of surviving underperformers shape Colombia's development problem.

The links between capabilities and export dynamics in developing countries, on how firm capabilities, product quality and market knowledge shape which firms manage to export.

A river dries up. The soil turns salty. A harvest fails. Farmers across the developing world feel climate change constantly and personally, they rarely blame their government, or demand action.

Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) is one of three authors of a new review of the politics of climate change in the developing world. He tells Tim Phillips that almost all of the existing research on this topic is focused on rich countries, even though the developing world faces the worst of the damage,  and has the least capacity to absorb it, because in those countries the link between climate change and political action is more explicit.

Political solutions are needed: developing country income losses could run 60% higher than losses in wealthy countries, and climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty within a decade. Grossman's review turns up a paradox in the public opinion data. Concern runs high even where formal climate literacy is low, because people experience the crisis through a failed harvest or a dried up well, not a scientific chart. This disconnect isn't neutral, because vulnerability isn't simply inherited. It is produced, by decisions about who owns land, whose villages get seawalls, and whose voice counts when climate money is handed out.

The research behind this episode:

Grossman, Guy, Audrey Sacks, and Alice Xu. 2026. "The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 101-126.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Guy Grossman. 2026. "Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

About the guest

Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded and co-directs Penn's Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), and his research spans governance, forced displacement, political accountability, and conflict processes across the developing world, with a particular regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Research cited in this episode

Extreme poverty projections. World Bank economists Bramka Arga Jafino, Stephane Hallegatte, Julie Rozenberg, and Brian Walsh estimate that climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030; the wide range reflects uncertainty over which emissions and development pathway the world follows. Read the working paper.

Afrobarometer. A long running, pan African survey network covering more than 30 countries. Grossman's review draws on it to show that only around four in ten respondents identify human activity as the main cause of climate change, even as concern about its effects runs far higher.

The attitudinal and accountability channels. Two frameworks political scientists use to trace how climate exposure might change political behaviour. The attitudinal channel asks whether living through a flood or a drought changes what someone believes about climate change; the accountability channel asks whether it changes their vote. Grossman finds evidence for both, but little that explains when concern turns into political pressure.

Maladaptation. The academic term for private adaptation that shifts harm onto someone else, such as a village embankment that protects one community by pushing floodwater into the next. Grossman uses it to illustrate why adaptation without government coordination can widen inequality rather than close it.

Ecuador land titling. Mark Buntaine, Stuart Hamilton, and Marco Millones's 2015 study of a titling programme in Morona Santiago found it did almost nothing to slow deforestation, because the state never backed the new titles with enforcement. Grossman cites it as evidence that representation without power tends to fail.

Indigenous managed land. Research led by Stephen Garnett finds that Indigenous peoples, roughly 6.2% of the world's population, manage more than a quarter of the planet's land surface, often protecting carbon sinks more effectively than formally designated protected areas.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Financing climate adaptation: what works, what doesn't, and can carbon credits help to bridge the gap? Namrata Kala, Rohini Pande, and Catherine Wolfram pick up where Grossman leaves off, on who pays for adaptation when governments won't.

How the urban environment can adapt to climate change. Matthew Kahn and Siqi Zheng discuss how cities in the developing world can adapt their buildings and infrastructure as climate driven migration accelerates.

Related reading on VoxDev.org

Climate politics: understanding political inaction on climate change. Allan Hsiao and Nicholas Kuipers show that Indonesian politicians underestimate voter concern about climate and pollution, and that correcting their misperceptions does not, on its own, produce policy action; a real world case of the accountability channel breaking down.

Political representation and forest conservation? This finds that transferring formal political power, not just consultation, to India's historically marginalised Scheduled Tribes led to a measurable fall in deforestation.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EacHFVRt9p4 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/has-development-economics-lost-its-way/id1866874059?i=1000775748550 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Lcy3FrbBuoE2nj3cnhOAm?si=76aedb574426479e 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8924691-has-development-economics-lost-its-way 
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/has-development-economics-lost-its 

What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions?

Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem.

How many maize seeds should farmers plant in each hole? Ask the farmers and they say two or three. Agronomists can show them more reliable seeds, where they only need one. 

But change the seed and everything else changes too; the fertiliser, the spacing, the whole system. This is why getting better technology into the hands of African farmers, and helping them to find ways to improve their profits, is so much harder than it looks.

Rachid Laajaj (Universidad de los Andes) and Karen Macours (Paris School of Economics) tell Tim Phillips about an experiment in Kenya in which farmers ran trial plots on their own land for three seasons, comparing input combinations side by side, and were followed for five seasons more.

Farmers adopted the new inputs and their profits fell. But they kept experimenting anyway, season after season, until the losses became gains. The most skilled farmers went first, made the most mistakes, and paid the highest price; their neighbours watched, copied, and adopted at a fraction of the cost.

Each failed attempt costs a farmer a season. Lower that cost, Laajaj and Macours argue, and you change what is possible for millions of farming households.

The research behind this episode:

Laajaj, Rachid, and Karen Macours. 2026. "The Complexity of Multidimensional Learning in Agriculture." Econometrica 94 (2): 465-503. 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, Rachid Laajaj, and Karen Macours. 2026. "Why farmers struggle to adopt new agricultural technology" VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

About the guests

Rachid Laajaj is Associate Professor of Economics at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, with research spanning technology adoption in agriculture, corruption, and human capital, studied from a micro-development perspective with particular attention to the role of information. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Karen Macours is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, a senior researcher at INRAE, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in the Development Economics programme. Her research spans agricultural productivity, rural poverty, social programmes, and early childhood development. She chairs the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment of the CGIAR and is co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

Research and concepts cited in this episode

The trials. In 48 randomly selected villages in Kenya, ten farmers per village were invited to run a three-season agronomic trial on a small parcel of their own land, guided by an agronomist. Each trial plot was divided into six subplots; five tested different combinations of modern inputs and one served as a control. The trials occupied a tiny share of each farm, so the direct economic effect was negligible; the point was the opportunity to learn. A further 48 villages served as controls, giving a sample of 960 farmers followed across six seasons of data collection.

Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM). The input combinations tested in the trials followed ISFM principles; a sustainable intensification approach that combines improved seed with mineral fertiliser and organic inputs, adapted to local conditions. Its logic is precisely the multidimensionality the paper studies; the components work through their combination, not in isolation.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) provided the agronomists who guided farmers through the trials. The paper builds on joint work with IITA.

The target-input model. The workhorse theory of learning in agriculture, in which farmers learn the optimal quantity of a single input through experience; it dates to work by Foster and Rosenzweig in 1995 and underlies much of the literature on social learning, including Conley and Udry's study of pineapple farmers in Ghana. Laajaj and Macours extend it to many interdependent inputs, where adopting one requires re-optimising the others; what Laajaj calls the curse of multidimensionality.

Measuring farmer skills. The origin of this project; Laajaj and Macours spent years developing measures of farmers' cognitive, non-cognitive, and technical skills, work that circulated as CEPR Discussion Paper 13271, "Measuring Skills in Developing Countries" (gated). Asking farmers agronomic questions revealed that many had no single right answer; the answer depended on everything else the farmer was doing.

Employment in agriculture. Macours notes in the episode that agriculture accounts for half of employment in sub-Saharan Africa, rising to as much as two-thirds when the wider agro-food sector is included.

Conservation agriculture. A prominent example of a knowledge-intensive sustainable practice; it combines minimal tillage, crop rotation, and the retention of crop residues, so a farmer must learn several new practices at once and find a combination that works.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

African agriculture's underappreciated supply side. Hope Michelson on the other half of the adoption puzzle; the markets and firms that supply seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides to smallholders.

Strengthening climate resilience in agriculture. Tavneet Suri on how small-scale farmers respond to extreme weather, and the seed varieties that protect crops against floods and droughts.

Combining improved seed varieties and index insurance to address drought losses. Paswel Marenya on a trial in Mozambique and Tanzania that paired drought-resistant seeds with insurance.

Related reading on VoxDev

Agricultural Technology in Africa, the VoxDevLit surveying the evidence on what drives, and blocks, technology adoption by African farmers.

Improving agricultural extension and information services in the developing world, drawing lessons from nearly fifty randomised evaluations of constraints on smallholder productivity.

Encouraging agricultural technology adoption through autonomy: evidence from Mexico, on how giving farmers ownership of the adoption process makes new practices stick.

Harnessing the benefits of digital agriculture for smallholder farmers in East Africa, on text-message-based extension programmes evaluated in Kenya and Rwanda.

Wars get the headlines. A civil war can wreck a country's economy and dominate its news for a decade. But if you assume war is the most costly form of violence a society faces, you would be wrong.

In this week's VoxDev Talk, James Fearon (Stanford) joins Tim Phillips to argue that the violence happening quietly inside homes and on ordinary streets does far more damage than war and terrorism combined.

Drawing on his new book Worse Than War (PUP), written with Anke Hoeffler, Fearon estimates that interpersonal violence, meaning homicide, intimate partner violence and severe physical abuse of children, kills and injures more people than war, and costs society more too. Large-scale collective violence hits very few countries in any year. Almost every country carries rates of homicide and assault that exceed the global average for war.

Fearon's argument is not that war does not matter. It is that the interpersonal violence is less dramatic and often hidden from view. There is evidence on what works to reduce it, but we aren't giving the problem the attention it needs.

The book behind this episode:

Hoeffler, Anke, and James D. Fearon. 2026. Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and James Fearon. 2026. "Interpersonal violence costs the world more than" VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

About James Fearon

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research spans civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, the evaluation of foreign aid and institution building, and the costs of collective and interpersonal violence. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

The book is co-authored with Anke Hoeffler, professor of development research at the University of Konstanz and co-author of Breaking the Conflict Trap, whose work on the economics of civil war includes the influential conflict-trap research with Paul Collier.

Research and concepts discussed in this episode

Interpersonal versus collective violence. The book distinguishes collective violence, perpetrated by organised groups such as states, rebel organisations, terrorists, or criminal gangs, from interpersonal violence, committed by individuals. Interpersonal violence is broken down into homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical abuse of children. The central finding is that the average annual cost of interpersonal violence is far larger than that of interstate and civil war, somewhere between five and 20 times larger, with a best estimate of about eight times.

Prevalence, not intensity. The reason interpersonal violence costs more in aggregate is that it is far more widespread. Very few countries experience large-scale collective violence in any given year, but almost all countries carry annual death and injury rates from homicide, intimate partner violence, and child abuse that exceed global average war death and injury rates. For 2000 to 2019, the authors estimate a global annual average of not quite 1.5 deaths per 100,000 people from war and terrorism, against about 7 per 100,000 for homicide.

Intimate partner violence. The authors estimate global annual averages of about 3,300 and 1,600 per 100,000 people for intimate partner physical and sexual assault respectively, which is roughly twice those rates for women specifically.

Severe physical abuse of children. Measured conservatively, capturing beatings far more serious than a mild spanking, the estimates imply that 15% of children aged 14 or younger are subjected to monthly beatings that would be classed as assaults if the victims were adults.

Economic costs versus well-being costs. Civil war can cause severe economic devastation in the worst-affected countries, mainly through reduced growth, and at the global level the strictly economic costs of collective violence may exceed those of interpersonal violence. But economic loss is only one cost. Drawing on methods that use what people pay to avoid risks of death or injury, the authors estimate well-being losses that are far greater for interpersonal violence, because it kills and injures so many more people each year. The authors note that the difficulty of estimating the economic cost of interpersonal violence means their figures probably understate it relative to collective violence.

Why interpersonal violence stays invisible. National media and political debate focus far more on collective violence, partly because it is dramatic and episodic while interpersonal violence is persistent and, happening inside households, often practically invisible. Sustained public and policy attention on the scale of interpersonal violence is itself a step towards reducing its costs.

It is not just "culture". Against the view that little can be done because interpersonal violence is cultural, the authors point to a broad range of programmes and policies with evidence behind them. For homicide and intimate partner violence, measures that reduce alcohol access and consumption. For intimate partner violence and child abuse, adolescent dating programmes and parenting programmes. Across all forms, police reform to improve accountability and training, and more police in countries with low ratios of police to homicides.

Reducing collective violence. There is reasonable evidence that UN peacekeeping operations are a relatively inexpensive way to lower violence in civil war countries and to reduce the chance of war resuming after a peace agreement. The authors note that rising conflict among the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, and sharpening regional rivalries among larger states in conflict-affected areas, have sharply reduced the prospects for new peacekeeping operations for now.

How do courts work when they work well? You would expect them to be impartial, neutral, and consistent. In much of the Global South that is a tall order. 

So when courts fall short of it, are they failing?

Development institutions ask states to build strong courts on the North American and Western European model. Good governance follows, they argue. This model treats poorer, less democratic systems as deviations from a norm rather than as institutions doing different work.

Fiona Shen-Bayh (University of Maryland) joins Tim Phillips to review the evidence on what courts in the Global South actually do, and who they help. Where the state is weak, customary elders, NGOs, even rebel groups step in to adjudicate, and people often trust these forums more than the state's own courts. 

Taliban courts in Afghanistan upheld due process during civil war. Dictators sometimes build genuinely independent courts, because property rights attract investment and citizens' lawsuits tell the centre what local officials are doing.

The research behind this episode:

Rios-Figueroa, Julio, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2025. "Courts in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 28. 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2026. "Courts in the Global South." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.

About the guest

Fiona Shen-Bayh is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland. Her research spans authoritarian regimes, judicial politics, and the use of legal and judicial institutions as instruments of power, often drawing on digitised archives and text-as-data methods. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press) won the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize.

The paper is co-authored with Julio Rios-Figueroa, Professor in the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), whose work spans comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies, with a focus on Latin America.

Research cited in this episode

The triad logic of conflict resolution. Drawn from Martin Shapiro's Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (1981). A court is effective when two parties appeal to a third to settle their dispute, and three conditions hold: the parties believe the third party is impartial; the third party is neutral, not predisposed to favour either side; and the rationale for the decision is consistent with existing norms, the idea of precedent. The review deliberately relaxes the assumption that courts are effective only when all three conditions are met.

The rule of law revival. The wave of good-governance programmes promoted by the United States and Western European governments and NGOs after the fall of the Soviet Union, presenting strong courts as a remedy for corruption, instability, and tyranny in the Global South.

The fallacy of legalism. The belief that creating law through statute, legislation, or precedent is enough to bring about social change. The phrase, from Sandra Joireman's work on property rights in Africa, names a habit of thought rooted in the Western experience, where the state has historically enforced property rights and contracts. In much of the Global South the absence of the state does not mean the absence of rules and order.

Stateness. The extent to which a state exercises authority across its territory: its monopoly on violence in the classic Weberian sense, but also the creation of law and the administration of public affairs. Where stateness is low, non-state actors fill the judicial vacuum.

Taliban and Islamic State courts. Recent fieldwork-based research finds that Sharia courts run by the Taliban in Afghanistan upheld notable degrees of due process and impartiality, offering predictability during civil war, and that the coercion associated with the Taliban featured in only a minority of the cases their courts heard.

Courts in authoritarian regimes. A growing literature shows what courts do for dictators: establish credible property rights that attract foreign capital; monitor administrative conflict, as in China, where citizens' grievances against the state feed information upward to the centre; and, at other times, repress opponents or legitimise the regime by delivering popular moral outcomes even against the letter of the law.

Political competition and judicial independence. Electoral competition can sustain independent courts in healthy democracies, partly because divided governments struggle to coordinate against unfavourable rulings. Under instability or an expected change of regime, the relationship can reverse: incumbents pack courts to entrench their interests before leaving, and judges may rule strategically to align with whoever they expect to hold power next, a pattern visible across Latin America.

Access to justice and legal mobilisation. Social transformation through courts depends on people developing a "legal conscience", an understanding of the law and how to use it, and on support structures outside the judiciary: civil society organisations, bar associations, prosecutors, lawyers, and human rights groups that help citizens bring and sustain claims.

Courts and democratic backsliding. Courts hold neither the purse nor the sword, which makes them easy targets for hostile rhetoric, legislative threats, pressure to resign, and court-packing. Courts that are neither impartial nor neutral can still stabilise a democracy while rival parties remain uncertain of each other's intentions, provided both still accept competitive elections. Once a party, especially an incumbent, abandons that commitment, there is little a court can do alone.

Digitised judicial data. The digitisation and free publication of court records across the Global South has opened large-scale, fine-grained study of everyday jurisprudence, useful to scholars and to the judges, lawyers, and litigants who can now see how the law works in their own context.

The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed. 

In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's participation in politics, written with Peace Medie (University of Bristol).

They are not elite women with less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.

The research behind this episode:

Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The paper is co-authored with Peace A. Medie, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.

Research cited in this episode

Elite and nonelite women. The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.

The income puzzle. At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.

Vote agency. Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.

Varieties of patriarchy. All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.

Quotas. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.

Collective action. Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.

More from VoxDev

Where are the Indian female politicians?, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.

Related reading on VoxDev

Grassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.

Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.

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

Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa will fall by between 16% and 28% this year, according to the IMF. In past downturns, multilateral and humanitarian funding tended to fill the gap when bilateral aid dropped. This time those channels are shrinking too.

Gyude Moore, who ran the Liberian President's Delivery Unit under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, thinks the contraction is structural rather than a passing effect of the Trump administration, and that recipient countries should stop expecting the old arrangement to return. He wants economic growth put at the centre of development rather than treated as one programme among several. Instead of letting donors decide which programmes are run, he says, countries should run a growth diagnostic: a way of identifying the two or three constraints doing most to hold an economy back. Governments can then reorganise their budgets around removing those constraints, and use the diagnostic to decide which offers of aid to take and which to turn down. Moore calls this “sovereignty through analytics”. Aid was meant to be temporary, he argues, and the job now is to quickly reach the point of not needing it.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and W. Gyude Moore. 2026. "The end of aid dependency.” VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

W. Gyude Moore is a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was Liberia's minister of public works from December 2014 to January 2018, and before that deputy chief of staff to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and head of the President's Delivery Unit, which oversaw more than $1 billion of road, power and port projects in a country rebuilding after civil war. He also lectures at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. His work covers African infrastructure, energy, industrial policy and development finance.

Cited in this episode

The scale of the cuts. The IMF's October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa, using OECD figures, projects bilateral aid to the region falling by 16% to 28% in 2025, with more cuts likely. Moore says the cuts to multilateral and humanitarian funding run higher again, and that the most aid-dependent countries have been hit hardest, through weaker health, education and nutrition systems.

Growth diagnostics. A way of finding the constraints that matter most: the one or two that, once removed, allow others to ease. Moore likens it to a doctor running tests before prescribing. The method is associated with the Growth Lab at Harvard. He suggests governments hire an independent party to run the analysis, so the findings cannot be dismissed as political.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation. A US agency that runs what it calls a constraints analysis, then funds the removal of the constraint it finds. Moore offers it as an existing model for diagnostic-led aid, while noting that it has critics.

Sovereignty through analytics. Moore's phrase for using a credible diagnostic to set the terms with donors. A government can say what it is trying to do, ask for help where it needs it, and decline what does not fit. He points to Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe rejecting or walking away from US health agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy as evidence that recipient governments now have that leverage and are willing to use it.

The Development Alliance. Liberia's attempt, around 2014 and 2015, to bring every donor and NGO into one room to map who was doing what, spot duplication and find the sectors nobody was covering. Moore's assessment: useful, but voluntary, not written into law, and not built around a single diagnostic. His conclusion is that such a framework should be put on a legal footing.

Five-year plans. Moore, who teaches in China each autumn, points to the discipline that fixed planning periods impose, and argues that legislation can do a similar job of holding a development strategy steady across changes of government.

Delivery units. Small teams set up to push complex projects through where the wider bureaucracy cannot. Moore ran one in the Liberian presidency and calls them islands of competence; he offers them as a way around weak implementation.

The European politics of aid. Moore's reason for thinking the window may close. Nativist parties are gaining ground across Europe, from the AfD to Reform UK to the PVV in the Netherlands, and an ageing population will pull more public money homeward. Countries that do not adjust, he warns, may find the external funding gone.

It's 1990. A young staff economist walks into a director's office at the World Bank and says the number he's about to publish is "crazy". The director tells him not to worry about it. 

The number was the dollar-a-day poverty line. Lant Pritchett, now of LSE, was that economist. More than three decades later, he's still worrying about it. In this week’s episode he argues that the dollar-a-day line warped how the world thinks about poverty, by setting the bar so low that we can count billions of deprived people as not poor.

In a new paper, co-authored with Martina Viarengo (Graduate Institute, Geneva), their fix isn't to scrap the low line. It's to add a high one as well. They propose a global upper-bound poverty line of $21.50 a day, ten times the extreme-poverty standard, derived from four separate measures of material wellbeing.

Above it, you're no longer poor by any reasonable global standard. Below it, you're poor in a sense worth measuring. By that standard, 99% of Pakistan is poor, and almost no one in Denmark is. Should that affect how we think about anti-poverty policy? 

The research behind this episode:

Pritchett, Lant, and Martina Viarengo. Forthcoming. "Raising the Bar: An Inclusive Global Poverty Line." Journal of Development Economics. Available now as a working paper.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Lant Pritchett. 2026. "What the $1-a-day global poverty line gets wrong." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Lant Pritchett is a development economist and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. He worked at the World Bank from 1988 to 2007 and taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades. His work spans economic growth, state capability, education systems, and labour mobility.

The paper is co-authored with Martina Viarengo, Professor of International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research spans public policy, labour markets, comparative education, and international migration.

Research cited in this episode

The dollar-a-day poverty line. Created for the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report on poverty and based on the observation that national poverty lines in the poorest countries clustered at a low floor (Ravallion, Datt and van de Walle 1991). Updated for inflation, it now sits at P$2.15 a day in 2017 purchasing power parity. It was only ever meant to mark the lowest a global poverty line could plausibly be, not the line.

The focus axiom. A standard property of poverty measures, originating with Amartya Sen (1976), under which changes in the income of anyone above the poverty line do not register in the measure. Pritchett's objection is that this assigns mathematically zero weight to the near-poor; a household just above the line counts the same as a Danish millionaire, namely zero. He calls it an economic bug that became a political feature, because it takes global redistribution off the table.

Gresham's law applied to poverty. Pritchett's framing for how the simple headcount displaced richer, distribution-sensitive approaches; bad economics drove out better economics because it was easier to understand. He notes the World Bank of the 1970s was preoccupied with distribution, citing Hollis Chenery and Montek Ahluwalia's Redistribution with Growth (1974), so the idea that economists ignored distribution until poverty measurement arrived is a myth.

The two criteria for an upper bound. The proposed line rests on two ideas drawn from the tension between the focus axiom and standard welfare economics. One, material wellbeing achievement; the line sits where a household reaches a standard of living a rich-country citizen would recognise as adequate. Two, near enough satiation; the line sits where the extra wellbeing from another dollar has fallen so low that treating further gains as zero does little violence to reality. At twenty-one and a half dollars the marginal utility of income is roughly three percent of its value at the dollar-a-day line; at the World Bank's current high line of P$6.85 it is still around thirty percent.

Four measures of wellbeing. The number is triangulated across an iso-elastic utility function, food shares in consumption (Engel's Law), a household index of six basic conditions drawn from Demographic and Health Survey data, and a cross-national index of basics. The estimates cluster between twenty and forty dollars a day; twenty-one and a half was chosen because it is exactly ten times the dollar-a-day line, a focal point in the same way one dollar was.

The six minimal conditions of prosperity. Electricity, improved sanitation, safe water, primary schooling completed by older children, no child dying under five, and no young child malnourished. The test Pritchett applies is whether it would be absurd to call a household prosperous while it lacks one of them.

The rich of the poor and the poor of the rich. The tenth percentile in Denmark has higher consumption than the ninetieth percentile in Pakistan or Indonesia. This is why any global line that produces meaningful poverty in rich countries implies poverty rates near one hundred percent across most of the developing world; a point Dani Rodrik (2007) showed is widely misunderstood.

The prosperity gap. A distribution-sensitive welfare measure adopted by the World Bank (Kraay et al. 2025) that weights the whole income distribution rather than counting everyone above a threshold as zero. Pritchett offers it, alongside poverty-gap and squared-poverty-gap measures at a higher line, as the practical route to acting on a global upper bound without reducing everything to a single headcount.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Rethinking evidence and refocusing on growth in development economics, Lant Pritchett on what the problem might be if we rely exclusively on rigorous evidence in development economics as a guide for policy.

Rethinking how we measure extreme poverty, Charles Kenny asks: is it time for a new measure of extreme poverty?

Every civil service reform plan opens with the same list of complaints: poor performance, low motivation, weak accountability. Across six African countries and three decades, governments launched 131 separate reform efforts; not one fully achieved what it set out to do.

Martin Williams spent more than a decade working alongside Ghana's civil service before writing a book called Reform as Process that analyses the lessons from his experience, and the rest of the 131 reforms. For example, 34 programmes across six countries tried to link civil service pay to performance; none delivered. One lesson is that formal rules and accountability systems cannot govern what matters in a civil service: innovation, adaptation, co-ordination, the willingness to act on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Meaningful reforms often require no money at all. They require changing expectations from inside, starting small and building credibility, decentralising the leadership of change, and treating new formal rules as a last resort rather than a first step.

The book behind this episode:

Williams, Martin J. 2026. Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies. New York: Columbia University Press. Open-access PDF available at uplopen.com.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Martin J. Williams. 2026. "Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works)." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

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About the guest

Martin J. Williams is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His research spans the politics and management of policy implementation, public service delivery, and bureaucratic reform, with a sustained focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He previously worked as an economist in Ghana's Ministry of Trade and Industry as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow, and as a Senior Researcher at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Cape Town. Reform as Process has been shortlisted for the Douglass North Award for best book in institutional and organizational economics.

Research cited in this episode

Non-verifiable tasks. In organizational economics, a verifiable action is one where a third party (an auditor, a judge, an administrative tribunal) can determine objectively whether it was performed correctly. Non-verifiable tasks are those where no such determination can be made; they include innovation, adaptation, co-ordination across teams, and acting on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Williams draws on this framework, which originates in contract theory, to explain why formal accountability systems consistently fall short: they can only govern verifiable outputs, leaving the full range of non-verifiable tasks unaddressed and, in many cases, actively crowded out.

Performance-linked incentive systems. Williams's dataset covers 34 separate reform efforts across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia that attempted to tie civil service pay or progression to measured performance. Not one delivered sustained differentiated incentives on an ongoing basis; only two achieved even partial delivery of rewards, and none delivered sanctions based on measured performance. Williams argues this is not isolated implementation failure but reflects a structural incompatibility between formalised performance metrics and the non-verifiable nature of much civil service work. Managers respond rationally: they set soft targets, award uniform scores, and the process becomes a tick-box exercise.

Projectization of reform. Williams uses this term to describe the dominant approach: treating change as a time-bound, discrete intervention with its own budget, acronym, and implementing team, conceived separately from the organisation's core work. This approach systematically distorts reform goals towards formally measurable outputs (new policies, new laws) rather than sustained behavioural change, undermines credibility by signalling a predetermined end date, and reinforces the perception among civil servants that reform is a temporary performance before things return to normal.

Continuous improvement. Williams draws an analogy with physical fitness: achieving a target and then stopping does not sustain the gain. High-performing organisations, in the public and private sectors alike, treat improvement as an ongoing process embedded in daily work, not a periodic project handed to a specialist unit. Starting small is not an absence of ambition; it is how credibility is built and larger changes become possible. Williams argues civil service reform should be reconceived on these terms, with performance improvement treated as the job of everyone in the organisation.

Decentralised reform leadership. The dominant model of reform leadership, Williams argues, is a visionary leader driving a top-down plan. This model is counterproductive. It personalises reform in ways that guarantee reversal when the leader moves on, and it cannot reach the day-to-day interactions among the thousands of individuals and hundreds of teams that determine how a civil service actually works. A more effective model is catalysing rather than forcing: creating conditions in which teams can identify and solve their own problems, escalate issues, co-ordinate with each other, and act on ideas for improvement without fear of being ignored or penalised.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

How government analytics can improve public sector implementation, in which Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster discuss their efforts to use the data that already exists in governments to better understand how they function. 

In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story.

East Asia's post-war growth — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and their neighbours — had lifted millions out of poverty in a generation. The report documented the influence of export subsidies, state-directed credit, land reform, and government-business dialogue. But the bank, constrained by the Washington Consensus of the time, underplayed the industrial policies that were at the heart of this miracle.

Nancy Birdsall was head of the department that produced the report. In this week's VoxDev Talk, she looks back, talking to Tim Phillips about whether this stance affected policy in other developing countries.

Birdsall tells Tim Phillips how the report came to exist at all — financed by the Japanese government as a deliberate strategy to expose the bank's economists to a success story their prevailing framework couldn't explain. 

With industrial policy back at the centre of economic debate, Birdsall's new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives asks whether the bank missed its moment to embed those lessons into its operational work. 

The research behind this episode:

Birdsall, Nancy. 2025. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 39(4): 127–48. A free download is available at the Center for Global Development.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Nancy Birdsall. 2026. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle." VoxDev Talk (podcast). [Episode URL].

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About Nancy Birdsall

Nancy Birdsall is president emerita of the Center for Global Development, which she co-founded in 2001. She was previously executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and, before that, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, where she oversaw the department responsible for the East Asian Miracle report. Her research spans development finance, inequality, economic growth and the role of multilateral institutions in the global economy.

Research cited in this episode

The East Asian Miracle (World Bank, 1993). A 400-page study of the economic performance of eight high-performing Asian economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — covering the period 1965 to 1990. Commissioned with Japanese government funding, the report documented both market fundamentals and a range of active state policies; its handling of industrial policy was carefully hedged to remain within the bounds of what the bank's dominant Washington Consensus framework could accept. The full report is available from the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository.

The Washington Consensus. A term coined by economist John Williamson in 1989 to describe the package of macroeconomic and structural reforms — fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and market-determined prices — that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury broadly promoted as the framework for development in the late 1980s and 1990s. The consensus was dominant inside the bank during the period the East Asian Miracle report was written; countries following activist state policies did not fit its categories easily.

MITI (Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The Japanese government body responsible for coordinating industrial and trade policy during Japan's post-war growth period, including the direction of credit, protection of infant industries and promotion of heavy manufacturing exports. MITI was widely known inside the bank, but its role in Japan's development was not systematically studied or incorporated into the bank's policy advice until the East Asian Miracle report. It was abolished and reorganised as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2001.

Performance-based credit subsidies. A mechanism used across several East Asian economies in which exporters could access subsidised credit conditional on demonstrating actual export orders. The conditionality — credit only if you are already performing — was central to why the policy worked: it rewarded productive firms and withdrew support from those that failed to deliver. The East Asian Miracle report described this approach in detail without classifying it as industrial policy.

Japan's postal savings system. A government-run savings scheme that channelled household deposits through post offices into state-directed investment, providing below-market returns to savers while funding subsidised credit to targeted sectors. Birdsall notes it as a mechanism worth studying for developing countries seeking to finance industrial support without relying on private capital markets.

Indonesia and the airplane sector. The Indonesian government under Suharto sought to develop a domestic aerospace industry, with state subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). The World Bank's East Asia regional department, which managed the bank's lending relationship with Indonesia, was concerned that the East Asian Miracle report might be read as endorsing this approach. Their pressure to limit the report's treatment of industrial policy is the episode's opening anecdote — and the source of what is possibly the best line in the show.

IDB report on public-private dialogue in Latin America. Birdsall references work by the Inter-American Development Bank on the conditions under which structured dialogue between government bureaucrats and private-sector firms can support industrial policy; she notes that access at the highest levels of government — including the president — appears to be a factor in whether such dialogues produce results. 

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Industrial policy for economic development, Dani Rodrik on the evidence for active state roles in directing investment and exports, and the institutional prerequisites for making them work.

The future of the World Bank: Why knowledge is power, Penny Goldberg on the bank's role as a producer and broker of development knowledge, and how that function has evolved since the Washington Consensus era.

Related reading on VoxDev

Modern industrial policy: The Asian miracles' blueprint, a VoxDev Talk examining how the principles behind East Asian industrial success — performance conditionality, export orientation, technology learning — can be translated into policy frameworks for today's developing economies.

Where are we in the economics of industrial policies?, what three decades of research have established about when and why industrial policy works, and what conditions determine whether government intervention helps or hinders.

Implementing industrial policy effectively: Lessons from shipbuilding in China, how policy design and performance conditionality determine whether sector-level support produces lasting productivity gains — the same question at the heart of the East Asian Miracle debate.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjXmiaMPabQ 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-perfect-city/id1866874059?i=1000767322240 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MfSc3AWT6lT5jG9kvXW4B?si=371569bc3d374d72 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8902311-the-perfect-city 
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/the-perfect-city  

What does a perfect city look like in a low- or middle-income country – and how do you get there?

In the closing episode of the Ideas in Development cities series, Ed Glaeser joins Kurtis Lockhart and Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on what makes cities work. He sets out the three foundations every city needs (safety, mobility, education), why infrastructure without the right incentives and institutions fails, what 19th-century New York's cholera outbreaks teach Lusaka about water, why “bus good, train bad” still holds, and what the medieval European city has to offer sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing urban regions.

We also discuss the political art of being a great mayor, why "capacity eats policy as a light afternoon snack", and his three priorities for African cities over the next decade.

Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity?

Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions.

The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear.

Research and references discussed in this episode:

Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan. 2015. "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1): 22–53.

Rana, Annum Ather. 2025. Evidence on the Impact of Microfinance Program on Poverty Reduction and Income Security. Kashf Foundation Focus Note Series, April 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Roshaneh Zafar. 2026. "Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan." VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Roshaneh Zafar

Roshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, Pakistan's first specialised microfinance institution. A development economist by training, she worked at the World Bank before leaving to found Kashf in 1996 after training under Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Her work spans microfinance, micro-insurance, women's economic empowerment, low-cost private education and behaviour change communication. 

Research and context cited in this episode

Grameen Bank and the Grameen model. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983, Grameen Bank pioneered group-based lending to poor women without requiring collateral, on the premise that social accountability within borrower groups could substitute for asset security. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kashf was established as a Grameen replicator but diverged significantly in its approach: hiring women loan officers from the outset, replacing the group hierarchy with a peer partnership model (using the Urdu term baji, meaning sister, for both client and staff), and adapting products for Pakistan's religious, linguistic and cultural diversity.

The 2008 microfinance delinquency crisis in Pakistan. Over-indebtedness, predatory lending practices and the absence of a credit information bureau led to a sector-wide delinquency crisis in Pakistan in 2008. Following the crisis, regulators, lenders and the Pakistan Microfinance Network introduced enhanced consumer protection standards and a credit bureau to prevent multiple borrowing. Kashf now limits lending to clients with no more than two active loans from any provider.

Banerjee et al. (2015) randomised controlled trial. The paper, a randomised evaluation of a microcredit expansion in Hyderabad, India by Spandana Sphoorty, found no statistically significant effect on women's empowerment, health, education or consumption over an 18-to-24-month follow-up period. It became the most-cited challenge to microfinance's development impact. Zafar's counter-argument turns on time horizon: empowerment, she argues, is a decade-scale process that short-panel RCTs cannot capture. A University of Minnesota longitudinal analysis of ten years of Kashf client data found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of loans taken and business income, and between savings behaviour and subsequent business investment.

Behaviour change communication: theater and television. Kashf has used street theater for thirty years to communicate on topics including child marriage, girls' education, reproductive health and insurance take-up. After Zafar attended a conference session on the impact of telenovelas on gender norms in Brazil and Mexico, the foundation moved into television drama production, covering topics including child sexual abuse, human trafficking and cybercrime. A child sexual abuse drama prompted a legal notice from PEMRA (the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority), which was successfully contested. The dramas are produced with a media and creative team to ensure sensitive handling of difficult subjects.

The gender bond and gender sukuk. In 2005, Zafar rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The experience prompted a long-term ambition to connect micro women entrepreneurs to capital markets. Kashf subsequently issued a gender bond listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, followed by a gender sukuk (Sharia-compliant bond) listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — the first such instrument linking Pakistani microfinance to international Islamic capital markets.

Low-cost private schools. Research by Kashf found that clients, once they had access to income, were moving their children from public to low-cost private schools; teacher absenteeism in private schools was far lower. Further research showed 70% of these schools were run by women. Kashf began financing them; it now supports over 3,000 such schools, with a requirement that girls constitute at least 50% of enrolment.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Breaking down access constraints faced by women: Experimental evidence from Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how removing specific barriers to vocational training take-up shifts economic participation among women in Pakistan — the supply-side complement to Kashf's demand-side model.

How safe transport could unlock women's labour force participation in Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how mobility constraints suppress women's economic activity in urban Pakistan, and how subsidised women-only transport services can shift that.

Related reading on VoxDev

What have we learned about microfinance?, a VoxDev article reviewing the evidence base on microfinance impact, including the conditions under which credit does and does not produce lasting change in household welfare.

Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, a VoxDev article on evidence that participation in group lending schemes produces political voice and civic engagement even when economic empowerment effects are limited.

Empowering women through digital financial services, a VoxDev article on how mobile money and digital accounts give women a private, named financial identity — and what that does to their control over household resources.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities. 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOPG6UmOHGU
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs/id1866874059?i=1000766172534
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BoYX7rfpjn86KndCxsnyd?si=53213815c1fd4408
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8899287-cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/leonard-wantchekon-youth-governance-and-africas-urban-future 

Are African cities a powder keg of restless youth – or the most promising place to build prosperity, peaceful politics and shared civic life?

Leonard Wantchekon joins Ideas in Development to argue that African cities should be seen as a youth opportunity, not a youth problem.

We discuss recent unrest in Kenya and Tanzania, his work showing that clientelism is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.

Between 1959 and 1961, between thirty and forty million people starved to death in China. The Great Famine had many causes, and one of them was a campaign to eradicate sparrows.

Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago tells Tim Phillips about Mao Zedong's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which led to the mass killing of sparrows, set off a chain of consequences that scientists had warned about, but political pressure had silenced. Sparrows eat crops, but they also eat the locusts and other insects that destroy the crops. Remove the sparrows and the pests go unchecked. Wang and his co-authors estimate the eradication cut national grain yields by 8-9%, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total agricultural decline during the famine.

The research behind this episode:

Frank, Eyal G., Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You. 2024. "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China." NBER Working Paper 34087.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Shaoda Wang. 2025. "How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.” VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Shaoda Wang

Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. His research spans environmental economics, political economy and development, with a focus on how state capacity and political incentives shape environmental and health outcomes in China and other developing countries.

Research cited in this episode

The Four Pests Campaign (1958). Launched as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the grounds that they ate grain and reduced agricultural yields. Several prominent Chinese scientists warned at the time that removing sparrows would destabilise the food chain by eliminating a key predator of crop pests, particularly locusts. Their advice was ignored. The campaign resulted in the killing of an estimated two billion sparrows.

County gazetteers as a data source. Official harvest data reported by local governments to the central government during the Great Leap Forward was heavily inflated; local officials faced strong political incentives to overstate output, and those exaggerated figures contributed to the famine by masking food shortages from central planners. Wang and his co-authors instead use county gazetteers: records compiled by local elites through a bottom-up process with no link to the political reward structures that distorted official reporting. Comparison between the two sources reveals the scale of over-reporting in the official data.

Sparrow habitat suitability index. Rather than relying on reported sparrow kill counts, which were distorted by local officials seeking to demonstrate compliance with campaign targets, the paper constructs an index of how suitable each county's climate and ecological conditions are for sparrow habitation. Counties with high sparrow suitability were more exposed to the shock of eradication; comparing their crop yield and mortality trajectories against low-suitability counties before and after the campaign provides the causal identification strategy. The two groups followed similar trajectories before the campaign; divergence afterwards is attributed to the eradication.

State food procurement as a famine amplifier. The Great Famine was not simply a production shortfall. The central government continued to export food during the famine years because inflated harvest reports gave it no signal of the actual crisis. State procurement quotas extracted grain from rural communities at a time when households were already facing starvation; the political system that caused the sparrow eradication was also the mechanism that amplified its consequences.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

The economics of ecosystems: How nature and economies interact. Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago — a co-author of the sparrows paper — on how to measure the economic value of biodiversity. His research on bats and white-nose syndrome, and on desert locusts, shows what happens when natural pest control collapses; the sparrows episode is the historical counterpart.

Related reading on VoxDev

The political economy of policy learning: Evidence from China, a VoxDev article on how misaligned incentives across China's political hierarchy distort policy experimentation and produce systematically exaggerated signals — the same dynamic that inflated both the sparrow kill counts and the harvest figures during the Great Leap Forward.

Autocratic rule and social capital: Evidence from Imperial China, a VoxDev article on the long-run effects of political persecution under autocratic rule in China, and how the suppression of dissent shapes economic and social behaviour across generations.

The economics of conservation in low- and middle-income countries, a VoxDev article surveying the evidence on maintaining natural ecosystems, the role of governance, and the costs of losing species whose economic value is not yet understood.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKF3aJ96L2o 
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-cities 

How does organised crime take over a city – and can mayors act before it does?

Chris Blattman, economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, joins the Ideas in Development cities series to explain how street gangs evolve into powerful criminal confederations, why cities like Medellín can have low homicide rates and still be almost completely captured, and what the "terrible trade-off" between violence, criminal power and political corruption means for policymakers.

We then discuss the perils faced by fast-growing African cities, where the conditions for organised crime to take root are quietly assembling.

Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/

Decades of agricultural development policy have chased yield. Bigger harvests, better seeds, more fertiliser. But how can we make farming more profitable? 

Craig McIntosh of UC San Diego is academic lead on a J-PAL Policy Insight covering twenty-three randomised evaluations of credit and grants for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. He tell Tim Phillips that although yields and revenues often rise, profit rarely responds in the same way. When farmers are already running their farms close to the margin, costs rise at the same rate as income, and the household bank balance does not move much. What can we bundle with credit to change that situation?

The research behind this episode:

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Can relaxing credit constraints boost farmers' profits?” J-PAL Policy Insights. Last modified February 2026. Academic leads: Craig McIntosh and Tavneet Suri; insight authors: Leonie Rauls and Rebecca Toole.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Craig McIntosh. 2026. “Boosting farmers' profits?" VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Craig McIntosh is Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. His research spans development finance, agricultural credit, cash transfer design and the evaluation of large-scale anti-poverty interventions. 

Research cited in this episode

Microcredit take-up among farmers. Across four randomised evaluations of traditional microcredit aimed at farmers, in Morocco, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Malawi, take-up sat between 13 and 33 percent. Standard microcredit repayment begins a week or two after disbursement, which is incompatible with a crop cycle that pays out cash once or twice a year. Group liability also breaks down in agriculture, where shocks like drought or floods hit borrowers together rather than one at a time.

Tailoring credit to the agricultural cycle. Restructured loans push take-up much higher. Nakano and Magezi in Tanzania allowed rice farmers to defer 80 percent of repayment until harvest; 39 percent borrowed and over 92 percent repaid. William Jack and co-authors in Kenya offered dairy farmers asset-collateralised loans for a water tank; take-up reached 44 percent against 2.4 percent for a typical joint-liability product. Lambon-Quayefio, Manjeer and Udry in Ghana offered digital credit with a three-month grace period; 59 percent of farmers took it up.

Sell low, buy high. Burke and co-authors in Kenya showed that smallholders routinely sell at the post-harvest price trough and buy back grain at hungry-season prices 20 to 40 percent higher. Harvest-time loans that allowed farmers to delay sales had take-up of 64 percent and produced returns around 29 percent for borrowers. Treated villages also saw flatter price trajectories, generating spillover benefits for non-borrowers.

Lean-season credit. Fink, Jack and Masiye in Zambia found that lean-season loans let farmers stop hiring out their labour and instead work their own land. Output rose by 9 percent. Loan repayments were comparable to the gain, leaving farmers roughly even on profits.

Selection into credit markets. Beaman, Karlan, Thuysbaert and Udry in Mali first offered loans, then offered grants to those who had refused. Returns to capital among would-be borrowers were on the order of 130 percent. Returns among those who had refused the loan were close to zero. Credit appears to self-target toward farmers who can use it productively, which is regressive in welfare terms and also exactly what a capital-scarce economy needs credit markets to do.

Input subsidy programmes (ISPs). Jayne and co-authors reviewed eighty studies of fertiliser subsidies across sub-Saharan Africa. Yields rise while subsidies are in place; profitability is mixed; targeting is frequently politically distorted, often skewed toward better-connected or wealthier farmers. The standout randomised exception is Carter, Laajaj and Yang in Mozambique, where two-thirds of recipients had never used fertiliser before; the programme produced sustained gains and a high benefit-cost ratio. By contrast, Gignoux and co-authors in Haiti found a fertiliser-voucher subsidy crowded out farmers' own input spending and lowered yields once the subsidy ended.

Cash transfers and diversification. In six studies measuring both farm and non-farm outcomes, three found households doubled down on agriculture and three saw movement into non-farm enterprises. The Zambian Child Grant evaluation by Handa and co-authors saw women invest in seeds, fertiliser and livestock and start non-farm businesses, with household income roughly doubling.

Bundled input programmes. Four randomised evaluations bundled credit or a grant with information, training or market access. All four lifted revenues; three of the four lifted incomes or profits. Harou and co-authors in Tanzania showed that fertiliser vouchers alone and soil testing alone did nothing; only the combination raised yields and revenues. Ashraf, Gine and Karlan's Kenya study on French-bean and baby-corn export found credit increased programme participation from 27 to 41 percent, even where it did not further raise income among participants.

In 2017, Argentina had the highest corporate income tax rate in Latin America. Reducing it was politically popular and economically desirable. Getting it through a Congress where the governing coalition held just 19% of Senate seats, while the fiscal deficit ran at close to 8% of GDP, was a harder problem. A package of reforms was planned, revenue-neutral and phased over five years: corporate tax on reinvested profits would fall from 35% to 25%; a minimum-wage deduction would reduce the payroll tax burden on firms employing informal workers; energy, alcohol, and sugar taxes would be reorganised on rational, emissions-based principles; and provincial governments would agree to phase out the cascading "ingresos brutos" sales tax in exchange for limits on public spending. 

In this week’s VoxDev Talk, Sebastian Galiani, who served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina and led the design of the reform, tells Tim Phillips how the Macri government attempted to reform its tax structure, and what it teaches us about policy. Credibility, he says, was the biggest constraint: in a country as economically volatile as Argentina, what matters is not only what the law says, but whether investors believe it will survive a change of government.

The research behind this episode:

Afonso, Santiago, and Sebastian Galiani. 2025. "Motives and Constraints in the Implementation of Argentina's 2017 Tax Reform." NBER Working Paper 34442.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Galiani. 2026. "Argentina's 2017 tax reform." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). 

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About the guest

Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. His research spanning political economy, public finance, and Latin American development has examined how institutions, property rights, and fiscal policy shape economic outcomes. He served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina in 2017, where he led the design of the tax reform he examines in this episode.

Research cited in this episode

Ingresos brutos is a cascading sales tax levied by Argentina's provincial governments, applied each time a good changes hands along the supply chain. Unlike a value-added tax, it allows no deduction for taxes already paid at earlier stages; the burden compounds with the length of the production chain, making it particularly punishing for manufactured goods that pass through many hands. Galiani's team negotiated a deal under which the provinces agreed to phase this system out over five years and move toward a simpler, less distortive sales tax structure.

Second-best reform is the practice of improving a policy system as far as constraints allow rather than designing for the theoretically optimal outcome that cannot be achieved in practice. Galiani frames the 2017 reform explicitly in these terms: the design team mapped the distance between Argentina's actual tax system and optimal taxation, then asked how far they could move in that direction given the fiscal, political, and negotiating constraints they faced. The result departed from the ideal in every dimension; it was nonetheless a genuine improvement on what existed before.

Escape clauses are provisions written into legislation that suspend or modify specific commitments if defined trigger conditions are met. The 2017 reform included several: the inflation adjustment for the calculation of corporate assets, for example, would apply only if inflation continued to fall. Galiani describes escape clauses as essential when designing policy in high-volatility environments where external shocks are not exceptional events but a predictable feature of the landscape.

Related reading on VoxDev

How should economic researchers give policy advice? Stefan Dercon argues that giving second-best advice, taking into account what is politically achievable rather than what is theoretically optimal, often produces better outcomes than the standard model of advocating for the ideal and waiting.

How progressive taxation affects tax compliance in developing countries. Reforms that boost progressivity and are effectively communicated can yield higher compliance alongside greater fairness; evidence that the design and communication of a reform matter as much as its content.

Improving payroll-tax compliance through decentralised monitoring: Evidence from Mexico. Evidence that even formal firms evade payroll taxes, and that giving workers the right incentives to monitor their employers' wage reporting can substantially improve compliance; relevant context for Argentina's effort to reduce the payroll tax burden on unskilled workers.

At the start of every planting season, smallholder farmers needs seeds and fertiliser, but the income from the harvest that would pay for them is many months away. With no credit history and no collateral, banks aren’t going to give credit to farmers.They cope by selling livestock, pledging part of the harvest to a trader at a discount, or turning to neighbours.

Can we do a better job of lending to farmers? Monica Lambon-Quayefio of the University of Ghana tells Tim Phillips about a digital lending product for farmers in southern Ghana shows what this approach can do — but also where it still falls short. Working with Farmerline, a social enterprise that scores creditworthiness from farm and sales data rather than formal records, the trial randomly assigned eligible applicants to receive input loans worth around $40. Farm input expenditures rose by around 11%. But not profits. Find out why in this week’s episode.

The research behind this episode:

Karlan, Dean, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry. 2026. "Access to Digital Credit for Smallholder Farmers: Experimental Evidence from Ghana." Journal of Development Economics 181.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Monica Lambon-Quayefio. 2026. "Can digital credit unlock investment in smallholder farms?" VoxDev Talk 

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About Monica Lambon-Quayefio

Monica Lambon-Quayefio is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, where her research focuses on social protection, agricultural technology, and experimental methods in development economics. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Dean Karlan, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry, all of Northwestern University.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what Ghana's experience with mobile money reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what it takes for digital finance to reach the very poor.

What have we learned about microfinance?: What decades of research have established, where the evidence remains contested, and what the most important open questions are for policymakers thinking about expanding access to credit in low-income settings.

Related reading on VoxDev

The impact of digital credit in low-income countries: an overview of the evidence on how digital lending products affect borrowers, including the risks of overborrowing and the conditions under which short-term digital credit translates into improved economic outcomes.

How to boost digital banking adoption and savings in Ghana: evidence on what drives uptake of digital financial services among low-income households in Ghana, and what works when trying to shift behaviour away from informal savings arrangements.

Rich people live longer than poor people in every country that researchers have studied. In the United States today, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1% of individuals exceeds ten years. The relationship between money and health is steepest at the bottom of the income distribution, where additional resources buy the most: when people are poor, there is a great deal that money can do for their health. 

In this week’s episode, Adriana Lleras-Muney of UCLA tells Tim Phillips that the evidence on the relationship between poverty and health is less certain than policymakers tend to assume. Causality runs in both directions: poor health is one of the fastest routes into poverty, and understanding how much of the association flows in each direction is still an active debate. Giving poor people more money does not reliably translate into better health within the timescales and amounts that most experiments can test, because the details matter: how long the transfer lasts, whether it is conditional, and what receiving it signals about a person's economic future all shape what they actually do with it.

The most consistent finding from the policy evidence is that public health insurance and access to cheap, proven preventive interventions tend to deliver more reliable health gains than cash transfers — but whether either works in practice depends heavily on the implementation and the trust that governments can build with the populations they are trying to help.

The research behind this episode:

Lleras-Muney, Adriana, Hannes Schwandt, and Laura R. Wherry. 2025. "Poverty and Health." Annual Review of Economics 17.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim and Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2026. "Poverty and Health." VoxDev Talk (podcast).

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About Adriana Lleras-Muney

Adriana Lleras-Muney is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research focuses on health economics and the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and health outcomes across the life course. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University) and Laura R. Wherry (NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service).

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

The history of cash transfers: Tim Phillips speaks with Ugo Gentilini about his research tracing 2,500 years of giving people money, from Ancient Rome to the COVID pandemic, and what history reveals about the recurring debates over when and why cash transfers work.

Improving access to and use of clean water: Tim Phillips speaks with Pascaline Dupas about why access to clean water remains one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available, and the barriers that prevent its wider adoption in low-income settings.

Related reading on VoxDev

Cash transfers reduce adult and child mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries: evidence that unconditional cash transfers have measurable effects on mortality in poor settings, with implications for how we think about the relationship between income and health.

Effective health aid: Evidence from Gavi's vaccine programme: what a large-scale vaccination programme reveals about the conditions under which targeted public health interventions can make a lasting difference in low-income countries.

Eighty years after Indian independence, the economic fingerprint of British colonial rule is still visible at the district level. Two institutions in particular left scars: whether a district was governed directly by British administrators or by one of India's roughly 680 Indian princes, and what kind of land tax arrangement the British put in place. For example, by 1991, directly ruled districts had nine percentage points fewer middle schools and a 20-percentage-point lower probability of having a road than areas under indirect rule. The question was whether those gaps would eventually close.

Lakshmi Iyer of the University of Notre Dame tells Tim Phillips that by 2011 infrastructure gaps had closed completely. Targeted post-independence programmes, including the Minimum Needs Program of the 1970s and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of 2001, pushed schools, health centres, and roads towards underserved districts. The picture for land tenure is mixed. Areas that historically had landlord-based systems are still 17% behind non-landlord areas in wheat yields, and the gap in fertiliser use has widened rather than narrowed. One reason, the policy response was a universal subsidy rather than being specifically aimed at places that had fallen behind.

So colonial legacies can be erased, but only by policies designed to reach the places that were left behind. When policies have equalisation built in, historical gaps disappear. When they do not, the gaps persist.

The research behind this episode:

Iyer, Lakshmi and Coleson Weir. 2025. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" Journal of Development Economics 177.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim and Lakshmi Iyer. 2026. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).

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About Lakshmi Iyer

Lakshmi Iyer is Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at CEPR. Her research focuses on political economy, governance, and the long-run effects of historical institutions in developing countries. The paper discussed in this episode extends two of her earlier papers, one co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee and one sole-authored, both of which are listed in the research cited section below. 

Research cited in this episode

Iyer, Lakshmi. 2010. "Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences." Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4). The original paper documenting that areas brought under direct British rule had significantly lower access to schools, health centres, and roads in the post-colonial period, using Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse as an instrument for the selectivity of British annexation.

Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. "History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India." American Economic Review 95 (4). Finds that districts where the British assigned proprietary rights in land to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investment and productivity in the post-independence period than areas where rights went to individual cultivators.

Nunn, Nathan. 2007. "Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment." Journal of Development Economics 83 (1). Develops the theoretical case for why economies displaced into a low-production equilibrium by extraction or oppression can remain there long after the original impetus disappears.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

India's economic development since independence: Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian discuss how India's transformation across eight decades of independence has defied conventional models of development, and what it reveals about the relationship between political economy and growth.

Related reading on VoxDev

Drawing the line: The short- and long-term consequences of partitioning India: examines the economic and political legacy of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, and how a boundary drawn in the final weeks of empire continues to shape outcomes on both sides.

Historical legacies and African development: surveys the evidence on how pre-colonial political organisation, colonial-era institutions, and the slave trade have shaped the long-run economic geography of sub-Saharan Africa.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find the entire AI series.

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.

China became the world's largest bilateral creditor to developing countries over two decades, and for most of that time the scale of what it was doing was effectively a state secret. Its state-owned banks lent close to $1 trillion to developing-country governments, structured roughly half those loans against commodity export revenues held in offshore accounts, and concentrated the riskiest lending in countries such as Venezuela, Angola, and Russia. Net financial flows turned negative in 2019, and the countries that borrowed now repay more to China than they receive in new lending.

Sebastian Horn of the Kiel Institute tells Tim Phillips that despite the opacity and the distinctive collateral structures, we’ve seen this movie before, in the 1920s and 1980s: in the bust, serial short-term extensions of grace periods that defer payments without resolving the underlying debt, while affected countries cut spending to stay current. What Horn calls a "silent crisis" is underway in a cluster of highly indebted developing countries, too small to trigger global contagion but large enough to matter profoundly for the people living through it.

The challenge is whether China's lenders, debtor governments, and the broader international financial architecture can coordinate the kind of relief that will make a difference.

The research behind this episode:

Horn, Sebastian, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch. 2025. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." Journal of Economic Perspectives 39 (4).

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Horn. 2026. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." VoxDev Talk (podcast).

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About Sebastian Horn

Sebastian Horn is a professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and at the University of Hamburg, where his research focuses on international finance, sovereign debt, and China's role as a global creditor. 

Research cited in this episode

AidData. 2021. AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0. AidData, William & Mary. A comprehensive public dataset tracing Chinese government-backed lending and grants to 165 countries between 2000 and 2017, built from embassy records, parliamentary gazettes, central bank reports, and news sources. Much of the quantitative evidence in the episode depends on it, since China has never published a consolidated balance sheet of its overseas lending.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Is debt leading to the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources?: Tim Phillips speaks with Pushpam Kumar about how sovereign debt obligations shape governments' incentives to extract natural resources more intensively, and what that means for the long-run sustainability of resource-dependent developing economies.

Related reading on VoxDev

Navigating Senegal's unexpected debt crisis: how a country widely regarded as a model of fiscal prudence found itself in acute debt distress, and what the episode reveals about the vulnerabilities facing developing-country borrowers in the current environment.

Chinese development finance and public opinion: evidence on how Chinese-funded infrastructure projects affect attitudes towards China in recipient countries, with implications for understanding the political economy of China's overseas lending strategy.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of electronic transactions tripled in six Latin American economies. The share of adults using digital wallets, mobile money, and mobile bank accounts went from 3% in 2011 to 40% by 2021. A region that not long ago was defined by financial disasters, hyperinflation, and deep mistrust of banks has become one of the world's leading examples of how digital payments can transform an economy.

Diego Vera-Cossio edited Beyond Cash, The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Inter-American Development Bank's new regional microeconomic report on digital payments. He tells Tim Phillips how the effects of this revolution are more profound that freeing people from the need to carry cash. In Santiago, bus robberies fell when drivers stopped handling cash. In Brazil, firms in the most cash-intensive sectors grew substantially after the instant payment system Pix launched. In Colombia, people without any credit history started borrowing formally after being nudged to receive their social program payments digitally. And in Bolivia, where 80% of the workforce is informal, people are scanning QR codes at street market stalls. 

The question Diego, his colleagues, and policymakers int he region and beyond, are now trying to answer is how to build on all of that, and how to make it stick.

The research behind this episode:

Vera-Cossio, Diego A., ed. 2025. Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin American and Caribbean Microeconomic Report. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim and Vera-Cossio, Diego A. 2026. "Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean." VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Diego Vera-Cossio

Diego A. Vera-Cossio is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he works on social protection, financial inclusion, digital payments, and the design of public programmes in Latin America. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego. 

Research cited in this episode

Dominguez, Patricio. 2022. "Victim Incentives and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Bus Driver Robberies in Chile." Review of Economics and Statistics 104 (5). Exploits the reform that removed cash from Santiago buses to show that eliminating the cash target reduces robbery rates. The bus driver no longer carries anything worth taking.

Vera-Cossio, Diego A., Bridget Hoffman, Camilo Pecha, and Carla Hernandez. 2024. "Does Adopting Digital Payment for Cash Transfers Improve the Financial Inclusion and Financial Well-Being of Low-Income Households?" IDB Research Insights. A randomised experiment in Colombia: unbanked beneficiaries of a social transfer programme were randomly encouraged to receive payments into digital wallets. Those who switched had fewer failed payment attempts, could check their balance without internet access via SIM, and were more likely to take out a formal loan for the first time.

Inter-American Development Bank. 2024. Fintech Ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean Exceeds 3,000 Startups. Survey counts of fintech companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Found roughly 700 fintechs in the region in 2017 and more than 3,000 by 2023, with 20% of them offering payment-related products.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what the Ghanaian mobile money experience reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what that means for how mobile money can serve the very poor.

Mobile money markets and financial inclusion in Africa: Nicola Limodio discusses what happened when mobile money operators in Africa were required to make their platforms interoperable, lowering fees but also reducing rural coverage. A direct parallel to the interoperability debate in Latin America.

Related reading on VoxDev

Digital financial services go a long way: Evidence from Mexico: evidence on how expanding digital payments and digital financial services affects spending, savings, and economic outcomes in a large middle-income country.

The wide-ranging benefits of fostering financial inclusion in Mexico: on how policies that bring people into the formal financial system in Mexico produce benefits that extend well beyond the financial sector itself.

VoxDevLit: Mobile Money: a curated literature review covering what research has established about mobile money, financial inclusion, and economic outcomes, useful for anyone who wants a broader picture of the evidence base behind the episode.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find the entire AI series.

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ideas-in-development/id1866874059
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqy-QRDq-vD3YJ2t1rMUwx8BN1WTEA9A
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In this episode, Josh Lerner joined Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss how technology diffuses around the world, touching on the role of venture capital, universities and China.

We then cover what this means for the diffusion of AI, and what can be done to speed up diffusion.

For 70 years, a simple idea has shaped efforts to reduce prejudice: put people from different groups together under the right conditions, and contact reduces prejudice. Gordon Allport proposed it in 1954. A landmark 2006 meta-analysis of 515 studies seemed to confirm it, reporting an average effect of 0.4 standard deviations on prejudice measures. That paper has been cited more than 14,000 times. The credibility revolution has undermined this evidence, by correcting for publication bias that meant null results were seldom published. 

Matt Lowe of the Vancouver School of Economics has published a new review of 41 pre-registered studies, and he finds the average effect is one-tenth of a standard deviation. Those 41 pre-registered intergroup contact experiments cover nearly 40,000 participants across a wide range of countries, roughly half of them in the Global South. He tells Tim Phillips that the effects are real, consistently positive … but consistently small. 

Contact interventions are a waste of time. Costs can be low, and the alternatives have not yet been held to the same rigorous standard. But the gap between what the old literature promised and what careful experiments deliver is large enough to matter for anyone designing programmes to reduce prejudice between groups.

The research behind this episode:

Lowe, Matt. 2025. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" Annual Review of Economics 17.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Has Intergroup Contact Delivered?" VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Matt Lowe

Matt Lowe is an assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, and a J-PAL faculty affiliate whose research spans intergroup relations, development, and political economy. His website is at mattjlowe.github.io. He has previously been published in VoxDev discussing his field experiment on collaborative and adversarial caste integration through cricket leagues in India.

Research cited in this episode

Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley. The founding text of intergroup contact theory, which proposed that contact between groups reduces prejudice when it meets four conditions: equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and support from authorities.

Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2006. "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (5). The 515-study meta-analysis that established the 0.4 standard deviation benchmark for contact effects and became the dominant reference point for the field.

Paluck, Elizabeth Levy, Roni Porat, Chelsey S. Clark, and Donald P. Green. 2021. "Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges." Annual Review of Psychology 72. A review of 418 experiments on prejudice reduction from 2007 to 2019, identifying troubling signs of publication bias and finding that most studies evaluate light-touch, small-scale interventions with uncertain long-term effects.

Scacco, Alexandra, and Shana S. Warren. 2018. "Can Social Contact Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria." American Political Science Review 112 (3). A randomised field experiment mixing Christian and Muslim young men in a vocational training programme in Kaduna, Nigeria. Contact reduced discriminatory behaviour but did not change attitudes.

Mousa, Salma. 2020. "Building Social Cohesion between Christians and Muslims through Soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq." Science 369 (6505). Randomly assigned Iraqi Christian displaced persons to football teams with Muslim teammates. Effects were positive on behaviours within the intervention but did not generalise to interactions with Muslim strangers outside it.

Chakraborty, Anujit, Arkadev Ghosh, Matt Lowe, and Gareth Nellis. 2024. "Learning About Outgroups: The Impact of Broad Versus Deep Interactions." SSRN Working Paper. A field experiment in India finding that broad contact (meeting many different outgroup members) corrects misperceptions about outgroups, while deep contact (sustained interaction with one person) builds social and economic ties. Neither type generalises fully to the wider outgroup.

Lowe, Matt. 2021. "Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration." American Economic Review 111 (6). Randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to cricket teams or control groups, finding that collaborative contact increased cross-caste friendships and efficiency in trade while adversarial contact reduced them.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Promoting national integration in Nigeria: Tim Phillips talks to Oyebola Okunogbe about her research on the Nigerian National Youth Service Corps, which posts university graduates to states other than their own to promote national integration through intergroup contact.

Peacemaking, peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction: Salma Mousa and Lisa Hultman discuss what the evidence shows about building peace and social cohesion after conflict, including which interventions hold up and which do not.

Building social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools: an intervention in Turkey: Sule Alan discusses a programme designed to build cohesion between children from different ethnic backgrounds in Turkish schools, with effects on peer violence, reciprocity, and interethnic friendships.

Related reading on VoxDev

How competition between villages helped divided communities in Indonesia: in ethnically diverse or divided settings, shared efforts towards a collective external goal can help bridge internal divides and build a shared identity.

Reducing prejudice towards forced migrants through perspective taking: evidence on how perspective-taking interventions affect attitudes towards refugees and displaced populations.

How a documentary film fostered interethnic harmony in Bangladesh: a media-based approach to reducing intergroup prejudice, examining what content and delivery can shift attitudes at scale.

In cities across low- and middle-income countries, traffic crawls 24 hours a day. In Dhaka during rush hour, speeds average around 15km/h. At three in the morning, when the roads are empty, they average about 20km/h. Urban transport in the developing world is not only slow because of congestion. And so congestion policy, Adam Storeygard of Tufts University argues, gets you a small fraction of the way to solving the problems of urban transport in LMICs.

That counterintuitive finding is one many themes in Storeygard's wide-ranging review of what research actually tells us about how people in LMICs get from A to B. From informal minibuses to bus rapid transit, from a field experiment in Bangalore that tested congestion pricing to the long shadow of colonial railroads still shaping African trade today, the picture that emerges is more nuanced and more interesting than many policy blueprints suggest. He tells Tim Phillips what the evidence supports, where it runs out, and why fixing the roads won’t fix everything.

The research behind this episode:

Storeygard, Adam. 2025. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." NBER Working Paper 34354. Forthcoming in a special issue of Regional Science and Urban Economics.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Adam Storeygard

Adam Storeygard is Professor of Economics at Tufts University, where his research focuses on urbanisation, transportation, and the economic geography of the developing world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his work uses geographic and satellite data to study how infrastructure shapes where people live, how they move, and how economies develop.

Research cited in this episode

Akbar, Prottoy Aman, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard. 2023. "The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich and Poor Countries." NBER Working Paper 31642. The paper behind the Dhaka finding: assembling travel speed data across 1,200 cities in 152 countries, the authors show that cities in poor countries are roughly half as fast as those in rich countries, and that most of the gap is not congestion but structural low speeds in the absence of traffic.

Björkegren, Daniel, Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis. 2025. "Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos." Working paper. When Lagos introduced a major new public bus system, informal drivers on affected routes left,  so bus frequency on those routes fell on net. The big benefit accrued to other routes that informal drivers switched to, where prices and waiting times fell. Winners and losers, not a clean gain.

Franklin, Simon. 2018. "Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies." Economic Journal 128 (614). A randomised trial in Addis Ababa: providing transport subsidies to unemployed young people helped them search for and find formal jobs. Effects did not persist once subsidies ended, raising questions about how much the transport constraint itself was the binding one.

Borker, Girija. 2021. "Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9731. Women in Delhi attend less selective colleges than male peers with identical academic credentials, not because they are not admitted, but because of perceived harassment risk during the commute. Delhi university students overwhelmingly live with their parents, and the daily journey matters as much as the institution.

Kreindler, Gabriel. 2024. "Peak-Hour Road Congestion Pricing: Experimental Evidence and Equilibrium Implications." Econometrica 92 (4). A field experiment in Bangalore, paying drivers to avoid congested areas and times. The finding: congestion pricing would produce only modest benefits in Bangalore because traffic density has a relatively moderate impact on speed there, meaning you would have to charge astronomically high prices to shift behaviour significantly.

Jedwab, Remi, and Adam Storeygard. 2022. "The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010." Journal of the European Economic Association 20 (1). Shows how transportation infrastructure investments, including the legacy of colonial railroads built primarily to connect mines to ports, continue to shape where Africans live and how countries trade, with consequences that push African economies toward overseas rather than intra-regional commerce.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Michelson, Hope, 2026, “African agriculture's underappreciated supply side.” VoxDev Talk. How transport links are one of the many impediments that stop rural farmers from making the most of the opportunities of better agricultural inputs.

Related reading on VoxDev

"Urban transport infrastructure in developing countries”, the VoxDevLit review of research on urban transport in LMICs, covering buses, BRT, subways, and informal transit networks.

"Who wins when public transit challenges private transit?”, the Lagos bus reform discussed in this episode, with further detail on how informal drivers responded to new public routes.

"Perceived risk of street harassment and college choice of women in Delhi”, Girija Borker's research on how commute safety shapes women's educational choices, as discussed by Storeygard in this episode.

"The equitable benefits of Colombia's bus rapid transit system”, complements the discussion of BRT in Bogota, one of Storeygard's three best-evidenced cases for BRT benefits.

Particulate matter is, Michael Greenstone argues, the greatest public health threat on the planet. Worse than HIV, cigarettes, and alcohol. The average person  loses about two years of life expectancy to it. In India, the figure is three and a half years. The solution to this problem has been tested, and it works, at least in high-income countries.

Greenstone and his co-authors ran a randomised controlled trial in Surat, Gujarat: from 300 industrial plants, mostly making textiles, all burning coal, half were randomly assigned to a market where pollution permits could be bought and sold. The results: in the market, pollution fell 25%, compliance was near-perfect, and abatement costs dropped 12%. The cost-benefit ratio is as high as 200 to one. Many plants in the control group asked to be moved into the market.

The research behind this episode:

Greenstone, Michael, Rohini Pande, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan. 2025. "Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India." Quarterly Journal of Economics 140 (2): 1003–1060. An ungated version is available as BFI Working Paper 2025-53.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim. 2025. "Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries?" VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Michael Greenstone

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is the founding Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC) and the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. His research focuses on the costs and benefits of environmental quality, including the Air Quality Life Index, which tracks the toll of particulate pollution country by country. He previously served as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. 

Research cited in this episode

Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. The source of the life-expectancy statistics used in this episode: particulate pollution costs the average person on Earth roughly two years of life expectancy, with India averaging three and a half years. The index tracks this burden country by country, city by city.

The US sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade programme, established under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, was the canonical precedent Greenstone cited: a market that dramatically reduced acid rain in the eastern United States at costs far below pre-programme projections. He noted that the UK and EU have since built comparable CO2 markets. All have worked well. The question this experiment addressed was whether the same logic held in the developing world, where almost all the pollution now is.

Emissions Market Accelerator. An independent scale-up organisation founded by Greenstone and colleagues to replicate the Gujarat model beyond the original research setting. Current pipeline: a statewide sulphur dioxide market for Maharashtra (including large power plants, not just textiles), and advanced conversations in Pakistan and Brazil. Within Gujarat, a water pollution market is also in development.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Regulating pollution in low- and middle-income countries Rohini Pande and Nicholas Ryan, two co-authors of the paper discussed in this episode, on the political economy of pollution regulation in developing countries: why enforcement is hard, and what makes it work.

Air pollution and infant mortality Jennifer Burney on the health costs of particulate air pollution for young children, and what the evidence from Saharan dust patterns across Sub-Saharan Africa reveals about exposure and mortality.

The Social Cost of Carbon Michael Greenstone's earlier VoxDev Talk, on how assigning a monetary value to carbon emissions can drive better policy decisions and make the case for action that regulation alone struggles to make.

Related reading on VoxDev

Reducing air pollution: Evidence from payments to reduce crop burning in India How cash payments to farmers in northern India changed behaviour and cut the seasonal haze from crop fires that pushes Delhi's air quality to its worst each winter.

Paying to pollute: How carbon offsets actually raised emissions in China A cautionary study on market-based pollution controls: when incentives point the wrong way, a market can make things worse rather than better.

The effect of pollution on worker productivity: Evidence from call-centre workers in China Air pollution reduces cognitive performance and output, adding an economic productivity argument to the health case for cleaning the air.

A small number of Asian countries have provided thousands of high-skilled migrants to the US, many of whom have gone on to great success. What created this long-term trend, and what has it contributed to the US economy? And with changes in domestic policy, technology, and the opportunities in other countries, will it continue? 

Gaurav Khanna of UC San Diego tells Tim Phillips the story of high-skilled migration to the US and warns of the consequences for the US economy if, in the future, they decide to go elsewhere – or stay at home.

With the number of global refugees continuing to rise, integrating refugees has become a difficult challenge for hosts – and it is far from easy for the refugees themselves. Dany Bahar of Brown University and Giovanni Peri of UC Davis tell Tim Phillips about a new review of the evidence that evaluates what policies have worked. 

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask what needs to happen before AI can take off in Africa.

Rose Mutiso talks us through the current state of energy and digital infrastructure in Africa, why leapfrogging is not guaranteed with AI, and what fundamental bottlenecks need to be addressed.

Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/technology-innovation/ai-africa-barriers-opportunities-and-policy

Almost everywhere, women have less economic power than men, and earn less at work. Their commitment to childcare and work in the home gives them less spare time than men, as well as less recognition for the value of what they do. 

In another episodes based on the new book The London Consensus, published by LSE Press, Barbara Petrongolo of the University of Oxford, who one of the authors of the book’s chapter on Labour markets and gender inequality, and Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University, who wrote a response discuss with Tim Phillips whether there is a consensus on policy – and way to implement it – in this area. 

Download The London Consensus. https://www.lse.ac.uk/school-of-public-policy/research/london-consensus

Agricultural yields across sub-Saharan Africa are falling. We can create better seeds, fertilisers and insecticides which has the potential to increase agricultural yields. But what stops that potential being realised? We put a lot of attention on how to influence the behaviour or the choices of farmers, but what can policy also do to help the firms, large and small, that provide the inputs that farmers use? 

Hope Michelson of the University of Illinois is one of the authors of a new review of agricultural input markets. She tells Tim Phillips about the important gaps in our knowledge of how those markets are working.

The new book The London Consensus is a large and very comprehensive successor to the Washington Consensus that dominated policymaking during the 1990s. It attempts to capture where the Washington consensus fell short, and suggest better policy for development.

One area in which we need better policy is basic education. Despite the success of programmes to build and equip schools, outcomes are not improving. Pritchett’s chapter in The London Consensus examines the learning crisis and suggests what policy can do about it. He tells Tim Phillips that there are no short cuts – but examples from around the world show that solutions are possible. 

Labor markets in poor countries are very different to labour markets in rich countries. Millions of young people in developing economies who will be starting work in the next few years will face rationed jobs, volatile employment, and low-quality work. How will they cope and how can policy best help them?

Emily Breza of Harvard University and Supreet Kaur of UC Berkeley are the authors of a new review of how labour markets in developing countries. They tell Tim Phillips some surprising facts about how labour markets work, what policy can do better – and what we still need to discover to help those young jobseekers find decent work.

Ideas in Development is VoxDev's new second podcast!

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Today we're bringing you one of the episodes from our new series. Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran ask how Costa Rica, a small country of approximately 5 million people, became an attractive hub that now hosts operations for more than 1,000 multinationals. To take us through this period of economic change, we were joined by Andres Valenciano Yamuni, who played his own role in Costa Rica’s FDI journey during his time as Minister of Foreign Trade.