VoxDev Development Economics

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). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestLant 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 episodeThe 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), u

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).Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestMartin 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 episodeNon-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-ordinat

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].Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Nancy BirdsallNancy 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 episodeThe 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 hed

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). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Roshaneh ZafarRoshaneh 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 episodeGrameen 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 subs

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=kOPG6UmOHGUApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs/id1866874059?i=1000766172534Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BoYX7rfpjn86KndCxsnyd?si=53213815c1fd4408Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8899287-cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegsSubstack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/cities-of-opportunity-not-powderVoxDev: 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). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Shaoda WangShaoda 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 episodeThe 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 dat

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). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestCraig 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 episodeMicrocredit 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 p

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). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestSebastian 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 episodeIngresos 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

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 Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Monica Lambon-QuayefioMonica 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 topicMobile 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 VoxDevThe impact of

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).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Adriana Lleras-MuneyAdriana 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 topicThe 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

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).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Lakshmi IyerLakshmi 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 episodeIyer, 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 und

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/id1866874059Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6sIdIKctE8frdWaz9iyfl2Everywhere else: https://audioboom.com/channels/5165629-ideas-in-developmentYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqy-QRDq-vD3YJ2t1rMUwx8BN1WTEA9ASubstack: 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).Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Sebastian HornSebastian 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 episodeAidData. 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<b

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). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Diego Vera-CossioDiego 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 episodeDominguez, 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.

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/id1866874059Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6sIdIKctE8frdWaz9iyfl2Everywhere else: https://audioboom.com/channels/5165629-ideas-in-developmentYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqy-QRDq-vD3YJ2t1rMUwx8BN1WTEA9ASubstack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/In this episode, Josh Lerner joined Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss how technology diffuses around the world, touching on the role of venture capital, universities and China.We then cover what this means for the diffusion of AI, and what can be done to speed up diffusion.

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). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Matt LoweMatt 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 episodeAllport, 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 standar

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). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Adam StoreygardAdam 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 episodeAkbar, 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

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).  Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Michael GreenstoneMichael 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 episodeAir 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 be

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! You can listen to Ideas in Development wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe, so you won't miss an episode.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.

It’s one thing to enrol kids at school. But that is the beginning of their education. When they are there, they need to learn – and unless that starts with learning to read, we’re failing in our duty to them. A new report, produced by a group of literacy experts and is endorsed by GEEAP, shows that improving the quality of reading instruction can sharply increase reading levels in schools in LMICs, and calls on policymakers to act. Benjamin Piper of the Gates Foundation joins Tim Phillips to talk about what works, and how it can be implemented.

When the work well, carbon markets worldwide decarbonise economies and direct funds to the most efficient projects. Yet for these mechanisms to be effective, credible, and equitable, should we move beyond today’s fragmented initiatives and create a unified global carbon market that would integrate compliance and voluntary markets, with consistent standards and pricing? Robin Burgess of LSE and Rohini Pande of Yale are authors of a detailed proposal to design and implement this radical concept. Fresh from presenting the report’s insights at COP 30, they join Tim Phillips to explain the potential and transformative impact of a unified market for carbon.Download the report https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Pande%20et%20al%20Draft%20Proposal%20for%20a%20Unified%20Carbon%20Market.pdf

Many papers in economics have shown the scale of the damage that slavery did to Africa, but can we also make the argument that the slave trade helped cause Europe’s economic development? Ellora Derenoncourt of Princeton is the author of a recently published paper which uses new methods and new data to investigate this question. She talks to Tim Phillips about what historical records can and cannot tell us about that link, and what this data tells us about the growth of European port cities.

At home, men usually have more money and more power than their female partners, and this inequality is particularly wide in LMICs. What does research tell us about how decisions are made and, if there isn’t enough food or money or care to go around, who gets what? And when policymakers try to empower women do their well-intentioned policies work, and can they provoke a backlash? Seema Jayachandran of Princeton and Alessandra Voena of Stanford are the authors of a new review of the evidence, and they talk to Tim Phillips about why women’s power at home is so difficult to measure, and what we don’t yet know about how to increase it.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is common everywhere, but how common? What are its causes and effects? How can we do a better job of noticing it, measuring its impact – and ultimately, finding effective ways to stop it?A new review of IPV looks at the recent economic research on the topic, what this work can tell us, and what questions are, so far, unanswered. Manisha Shah of UC Berkeley is one of the authors. She talks to Tim Phillips about why IPV is hard to measure, and even harder to prevent.Read the full show notes here: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/intimate-partner-violence-causes-costs-and-prevention

The modern state, and the way in which is governs, is clearly very important. It provides social programs, education, disaster relief or, on the other side, it can cause violence and repression.We tend to assume that there is one model of a successful state, and the emergence of government has followed a single path with, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, “Getting to Denmark” as its end point. But is that the story that the historical record tells? And are successful states today, even in high-income countries, all governed in a way that matches our assumptions?Leander Heldring of Northwestern University is the author of a chapter on the forthcoming Handbook of Political Economy that examines the historical data and the types of government that have succeeded and failed. He tells Tim Phillips what he has discovered about what types of bureaucracy have succeeded in history, what forms of government that citizens in different times and places have chosen, and whether there is one true evolutionary path to a successful state.

We think of trade-driven growth during the era of hyper-globalisation as having created many “growth miracles” since the 1990s. But how did that happen? If we look at what created these miracles more closely, will that help us to understand how the geopolitical and technology shifts of the last decade have affected, and will continue to affect, the relationship between international trade and development? Penny Goldberg of Yale and Michele Ruta of the IMF are the authors of a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Development that questions many of our assumptions about the role of trade in growth miracles. They tell Tim Phillips about how this engine of development really worked – and why it might not work as well in future.

How can we train the next generation of entrepreneurs? In developing economies, more than a billion dollars a year is spent on this type of training, but does it work, are we training the right people with the right skills – and what opportunities are there to do better?David McKenzie of the World Bank is one of the senior editors of the latest version of the VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs. He tells Tim Phillips what we know about what training can achieve, why training programmes are not “one size fits all”, and what this all means for policy. The VoxDevLit on training entrepreneurs: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/training-entrepreneurs

What is the relationship between religion and economic development? Does economic development mean fewer people become religious, or more? What causes people to believe, and does organised religion adapt as societies change, and competition from other religions increases?Sara Lowes of UC San Diego, Eduardo Montero on the University of Chicago, and Benjamin Marx of Boston University are the authors of a new review of religion in emerging and developing regions. They talk to Tim Phillips about how our assumptions about what religion is, and why people believe, are not always accurate – and how an understanding of religiosity can help policymakers understand our motivations and create social policy that is effective.

“ Africa must become a full participant in global knowledge production, not just a passive recipient of solutions from elsewhere.” The journey of Leonard Wantchekon from teenage revolutionary in Benin to professor of economics at Princeton also led him to found the African School of Economics. In this week's episode, Leonard talks to Tim Phillips about what he learned from imprisonment and torture, how to improve African democracy, the legacy of slavery on trust, and how African economists can contribute to development in the region.

A fascinating new book called A Sixth of Humanity, Independent India’s Development Odyssey examines 75 years of development in the world’s most populous country – the successes and failures, the compromises, and the ways in which India has defied many of our ideas of how development should happen. The authors are Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute, also of course formerly Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. They speak to Tim Phillips about what Indian politicians and policymakers around the world can learn from India’s economic transformation.The book is called A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey. It is published by HarperCollins India. https://harpercollins.co.in/product/a-sixth-of-humanity/

Policymakers and politicians like to talk about creating infrastructure like roads, schools and transport systems: how it grows the economy, provides jobs, and strengthens domestic firms. But that infrastructure needs raw materials, people and constructors to create it. Martina Kirchberger of Trinity College Dublin is an expert on how stuff gets built in developing countries. Are the materials they need expensive? Will a construction boom also create jobs? Are there local firms who can do the work and, if not, who makes projects happen in the global construction sector? She talks to Tim Phillips about investment, partnership, and the surprising cost of cement.

Everywhere, women’s labour force participation is lower than men’s. There are many reasons to close this gap, but there are just as many reasons why it’s hard to do it. Research is discovering new and important insights into how financial constraints, social norms, the backlash from man and the problems of travelling safely reduce the opportunities to work from home. But which policies can change this? Release 2 of the VoxDev Lit on Female Labour Force Participation sets out this research, and Rachel Heath of the University of Washington tells Tim Phillips what it tells us about how work helps women, and policy helps women to find work.

When children are victims of bullying or social exclusion at school, it can be devastating for every part of their lives. This is a global problem, but with a global solution: if we can teach kids about empathy, self-control, or the effects of their violent behaviour, it can reduce bullying. How well do these policies work, and can they be scaled up successfully? JPAL is about to publish a policy insight on this topic, bringing together the research and summarising what we know. Sule Alan of Cornell University tells Tim Phillips about how we can spot bullying and exclusion in the classroom, and the interventions that work.

Macroeconomists know that our economic activity influences – and is influenced by – the natural environment in which it is embedded, but we have learned that modelling those effects is far from easy. The scientific consensus around climate change is strong, but there’s not similar agreement over appropriate economic policies to deal with it. On the eve of COP 30, a new review of macroeconomics and climate shows how far we have come but also points out where the gaps in our knowledge are.Adrien Bilal of Stanford University tells Tim Phillips about the state of research, its missing links, and the limits of what economists can do to influence the policy agenda.

How does culture affect development policy, and how does development policy affect culture? If we don’t take account of cultural norms or fail to learn about how they interact with well-intentioned polices, then this gap in our knowledge may be undermining development projects. Can better measurement and collaboration with other social sciences fill these gaps? A new paper investigates what we know about the culture, policy, and economic development, and Natalie Bau of UCLA, Sara Lowes of UC San Diego, and Eduardo Montero of the University of Chicago tell Tim Phillips about the potential, and pitfalls, of research into culture.

With record levels of armed conflict around the world in recent years, the study of conflict has gone from being a niche corner of economics into a thriving discipline that learns from, and interacts with, development economics. Rigorous empirical research on conflict is, however, relatively recent. The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme aims to provide a better understanding of the links between conflicts, economic growth, and public policies. this week we speak to Dominic Rohner (Geneva Graduate Institute), the Research Director of the programme, and Oliver Vanden Eynde (Paris School of Economics), the Head of Engagement about their new research that attempts to link the attributes of countries to the types of conflict they experience, how economic methods can advance our knowledge of conflict and the policies to reduce it, and what the work of ReCIPE can do to influence policy around conflict and development.

In 2025, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is 50 years old. “Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World”, its 2025 Global Food Policy Report, runs to just under 600 pages and covers the last five decades of progress in improving the world’s food systems – but also the challenges that remain, and the need for policy to keep evolving if we are going to build sustainable, healthy food systems. Johan Swinnen and Purnima Menon of IFPRI talk to Tim Phillips about the importance of agrifood resilience. With changes in the global economy, the equity and effectiveness of these food value chains will affect the livelihoods of billions of people. But has the progress in the last 50 years stalled?Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/food-policy-lessons-and-priorities-changing-worldDownload the report: https://www.ifpri.org/global-food-policy-report/

What happens from the moment goods are manufactured or harvested, until they are bought by consumers? As we know from experience, most of the things we consume reach us having been bought and sold, sometimes many times, by intermediaries – most of us don’t order a phone from the factory. Many interventions designed to increase the welfare of consumers in developing economies are designed to shorten these supply chains by cutting out those traders in the middle. But what happens when you do that in the real world? Meredith Startz of Dartmouth College tells Tim Phillips why the story of what intermediaries deliver, and even their effect on the prices consumers pay, is more nuanced than our economic models often suggest.

Like all of us, healthcare providers bring their biases to work. But if those biases result in a reduced level of care for their patients, how can we correct them? An innovative experiment in three very different countries attempted to reduce bias in contraceptive care for women. Zachary Wagner of USC and Manisha Shah of UC Berkeley were two of a multidisciplinary team that implemented program and evaluated the results. They talk to Tim Phillips about how biases shape contraceptive care, the methods that can help us to understand why they arise, and the challenges of creating a program that can work in different cultural and religious settings.

In the second of our two podcasts with Francis Annan of UC Berkeley on his research on mobile money first in Ghana, then beyond, Tim Phillips discusses how he worked with commercial providers, not just to set up the RCTs designed to investigate the extent and reduce financial fraud, but to ensure that the insights could be scaled up. While contacting sceptical commercial providers can often meet with little or no response, he says, the ability to frame research in a way that makes them realise the commercial value as well as the social value can get, and keep, their attention – and lead to a long-run partnership that achieves more than working independently or through regulators.

How can we design digital financial inclusion that minimizes fraud and maximises the benefit to the community in rural, low-trust, or cash-heavy economies? That’s the question posed by three studies of how mobile money works, or sometimes does not work, in Ghana’s villages. The author of those three studies: Francis Annan of Berkeley.In part one of a two-part VoxDev Talks special, Tim Phillips talks to Francis about this research, which has been a big part of his working life since he was a graduate student, the  innovative interventions to minimise fraud and misconduct from the agents who supply mobile money, and what this tells us about how to protect consumers in remote locations.Read the full show notes: https://voxdev.org/topic/finance/mobile-money-ghana-lessons-boosting-financial-inclusion