VoxDev Development Economics
Episodes
S7 Ep13: Ideas in Development: Josh Lerner on the diffusion of technology
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
S7 Ep12: Can contact between groups reduce prejudice?
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For 70 years, a simple idea has shaped efforts to reduce prejudice: put people from different groups together under the right conditions, and contact...
S7 Ep11: Transport policy for economic development
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
S7 Ep10: Reducing air pollution: Can markets succeed where regulation fails?
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Particulate matter is, Michael Greenstone argues, the greatest public health threat on the planet. Worse than HIV, cigarettes, and alcohol. The avera...
S7 Ep9: How skilled migration from Asia reshaped the US economy
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 create...
S7 Ep8: Integrating refugees: What policies work best?
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
S7 Ep7: Can AI take off in Africa?
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
S7 Ep6: Gender inequality in labour markets: Why growth and education are not enough
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
S7 Ep5: African agriculture's underappreciated supply side
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Agricultural yields across sub-Saharan Africa are falling. We can create better seeds, fertilisers and insecticides which has the potential to increa...
S7 Ep4: Schools are failing to deliver learning
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The new book The London Consensus is a large and very comprehensive successor to the Washington Consensus that dominated policymaking during the 1990...
S7 Ep3: Why labour markets look different in low-income countries
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Labor markets in poor countries are very different to labour markets in rich countries. Millions of young people in developing economies who will be ...
S7 Ep2: Ideas in Development: How Costa Rica became an FDI powerhouse
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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'...
S7 Ep1: How to solve the global reading crisis
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 s...
S6 Ep50: A unified global carbon market
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the work well, carbon markets worldwide decarbonise economies and direct funds to the most efficient projects. Yet for these mechanisms to be eff...
S6 Ep49: How the slave trade shaped development in Europe
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
S6 Ep48: Women’s power at home
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
S6 Ep47: Intimate partner violence: Causes, costs and prevention
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, meas...
S6 Ep46: The origins of government
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
S6 Ep45: Rethinking trade and development
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 h...
S6 Ep44: What have we learned about training entrepreneurs?
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
S6 Ep43: How religion shapes economic development
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is the relationship between religion and economic development? Does economic development mean fewer people become religious, or more? What causes...
S6 Ep42: Leonard Wantchekon on African development, democracy, and the African School of Economics
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“ Africa must become a full participant in global knowledge production, not just a passive recipient of solutions from elsewhere.” The journey of ...
S6 Ep41: India’s economic development since independence
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A fascinating new book called A Sixth of Humanity, Independent India’s Development Odyssey examines 75 years of development in the world’s most po...
S6 Ep40: Understanding the global construction sector
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Policymakers and politicians like to talk about creating infrastructure like roads, schools and transport systems: how it grows the economy, provides ...
S6 Ep39: What have we learned about women in the workforce?
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
S6 Ep38: Understanding and tackling school bullying
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, bu...
S6 Ep37: The macroeconomics of climate change
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Macroeconomists know that our economic activity influences – and is influenced by – the natural environment in which it is embedded, but we have l...
S6 Ep36: Culture and economic development
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 le...
S6 Ep35: Conflict and development
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
S6 Ep34: Food policy: Lessons and priorities for a changing world
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2025, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is 50 years old. “Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World”, its 2025 Global ...
S6 Ep33: The development bogeyman? Understanding the role of middlemen
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
S6 Ep32: Contraception without prejudice: Reducing bias in family planning
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
S6 Ep31: Partnering with business for development economics research
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 discusse...
S6 Ep30: Mobile money in Ghana
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can we design digital financial inclusion that minimizes fraud and maximises the benefit to the community in rural, low-trust, or cash-heavy econo...
S6 Ep29: The economics of period poverty
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stigma, shame and social norms around menstruation can prevent women and girls managing their periods with dignity and hygiene in low-income settings....
S6 Ep28: Can storytelling reduce violence against women and children?
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There is a long history of using “edutainment” – mass media storytelling, to pass on information about important social issues, and even to try ...
S6 Ep27: Why “brain drain” is an incomplete story of migration
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many developed countries are creating immigration policies designed specifically to attract the most talented migrants. We often assume that when thos...
S6 Ep26: Minibuses, major gains: Rethinking urban transit
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the second of our special episodes recorded at the 5th annual STEG conference, Lucas Conwell of UCL talks to Tim Phillips about how the private min...
S6 Ep25: Gas flaring threatens agriculture and livelihoods in Nigeria
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week on VoxDev talks we have two special episodes recorded at the 5th annual STEG conference. STEG is a research initiative that aims to provide ...
S6 Ep24: Going for economic growth: Lessons from Indonesia
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In October 2024, Prabowo Subianto became president of Indonesia. He inherits the “Golden Indonesia” vision: By the time the country celebrates 100...
S5 Ep6: Development Dialogues: What is the role of small farms in the future of agriculture?
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney discusses one of Africa’s most ...
S6 Ep23: Why we need to invest in foundational learning
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It was almost business as usual at the Education World Forum in London last month. At the world’s largest annual gathering of education and skills m...
S6 Ep22: Understanding Brazil’s falling income inequality
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Brazil, we bring good news for poverty reduction: Brazil’s formerly sky-high wage inequality is not quite so sky-high anymore. From 1995 to 201...
S6 Ep21: Can economists shape the future of AI?
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI’s boosters claim that it is going to revolutionize growth in the developing world. The sceptics, many of whom are economists, point to a thin evi...
S6 Ep20: How does social media influence conflict?
21 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme was established in April 2024 as a CEPR research initiative to provi...
S6 Ep19: Lovegrass Ethiopia: Building a business from the roots up
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As aid programs are cut across the developing world, the focus falls on what investors can do to help create economic growth. Someone who knows all ab...
S6 Ep18: Improving sanitation: What works and what doesn’t
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Millions of people around the world have no access to sanitation. They defecate in the open, or in facilities where it’s hard to avoid human contact...
S6 Ep17: Improving worker well-being
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often talk about providing not just jobs, but decent jobs, in developing countries. But in many parts of the world, workers still have incredibly h...
S6 Ep16: What have we learned about the informal sector?
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A large proportion of economic activity takes place in the informal sector in every country, particularly in LMICs. Informality, and the lack of right...
S6 Ep15: How poverty fell
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981, 44% of the world’s population were living in extreme poverty. By 2019, that number had fallen to 9%. This seems like a good news story, but...
S5 Ep5: Development Dialogues: Who will pay for the global energy transition?
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney is asking one of the most complex...
S6 Ep14: Graduation programmes: BRAC’s approach to targeting the ultra-poor
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Graduation approach to helping people to escape from poverty was pioneered in 2002 by BRAC in Bangladesh. Today the approach is used around the wo...
S6 Ep13: Profit shifting hits developing countries hardest
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Multinational enterprises in every industry are shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions. These corporate tax havens reduce tax revenues everywhere, ...
S5 Ep4: Development Dialogues: Are vocational training programmes effective?
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Vocational training is often seen as a silver bullet for unemployment and poverty, but does the evidence support that view? Why do so many training pr...
S6 Ep12: Can safe transport unlock women’s labour force participation?
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A fundamental part of women’s economic empowerment is helping women who want to work outside the home to find and keep a job. A major part of that d...
S6 Ep11: Is debt leading to the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources?
19 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How does rising external debt in low-income countries affect the natural capital that sustains our livelihoods? A new paper focuses on three river bas...
S6 Ep10: Simon Johnson on geopolitics, AI, and the future of global development
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Geopolitical alliances are changing rapidly. Technological innovation is reshaping our economies. These trends offer a cocktail of risk and reward for...
S6 Ep9: Rebuilding Sudan’s digital infrastructure amidst conflict
05 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Civil war – the latest in a long series of armed conflicts – broke out in Sudan in April 2023. Today, more than half of the population needs human...
S6 Ep8: Bangladesh’s path forward: Leveraging evidence-based policy
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bangladesh's development story in the 21st century is often regarded as a model of resilience and progress. But on 5 August 2024, student-led protests...
S5 Ep3: Development dialogues: The future of evidence-based policy-making
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With populist politicians taking power around the world, policymakers are relying less on research and expertise, as their political narratives priori...
S6 Ep7: How do cash transfers impact prices?
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What are the price impacts of cash transfer programs? Do they raise prices as well as incomes? And what is the impact on people in the community who d...
S6 Ep6: The economics of ecosystems
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How does a healthy ecosystem benefit humanity? How does the normal functioning of the economy impact natural habitats and animal populations? And what...
S6 Ep5: Peacemaking, peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme, established in April 2024, aims to provide a better understanding o...
S6 Ep4: What have we learned about microfinance?
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Published this week: the latest VoxDevLit covers microfinance. After many decades, microfinance is pervasive and popular in developing countries but i...
S6 Ep3: How can countries develop their economies in a changed world?
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2018, “Unorthodox policies for unorthodox times” was the title of the first in a series of blogs published by the International Growth Centre. ...
S6 Ep2: Rethinking evidence in development economics
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many development economists would argue that the most important innovation of the last two decades has been a commitment to use only rigorous evidence...
S6 Ep1: How does internet connectivity impact developing economies?
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 30 years, optimists about technology have been telling us that the internet is transforming our economies. What is the evidence that thi...
S4 Ep53: The role of evidence at development finance institutions
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Chris Woodruff has pioneered academic research into businesses, large and small, in low-income countries, He is also a non-executive Director of Briti...
S5 Ep2: Development Dialogues: How can emerging economies break free from the sidelines of global trade?
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the second episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, Catherine Cheney speaks to Amit Khandelwal of the Yale ...
S4 Ep52: Why do protests matter?
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When citizens demand change and feel they are not being heard, they protest on the streets. Thanks to social media and TV coverage, we see protests ev...
S4 Ep51: How the urban environment can adapt to climate change
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In our final episode based on this year’s BREAD-IGC virtual PhD-level course on the economics of cities in low and middle-income countries, Matthew ...
S4 Ep50: Helping jobseekers signal their skills
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re applying for a job, you want to know what you’re good at, and be able to prove it to the recruiter. If doing the recruiting, you want so...
S4 Ep49: The history of cash transfers
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There are more than 1.4 million papers about cash transfers. They inspired Ugo Gentilini, lead economist for social protection at the World Bank, to s...
S4 Ep48: The high price of Pakistan’s polluting power contracts
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Where does electricity come from? In developing countries, the power sector uses long-term, rigid contracts called power purchase agreements (PPAs) be...
S4 Ep47: How government analytics can improve public sector implementation
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Can better data analysis improve the way that a government functions. The Government Analytics Handbook, published by the World Bank, is both a practi...
S4 Ep46: Designing cities in developing countries
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As cities grow and spread, the uses to which land is put, and the value of that land, will also change. The challenges of urban planning, construction...
S4 Ep45: Strengthening climate resilience in agriculture
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and so it has never been more important to increase the resilience of small-scale farmers. What doe...
S5 Ep1: Development Dialogues: Financing climate adaptation
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the first episode of a regular collaboration between Yale's Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney speaks to Catherine Wolfram an...
S4 Ep43: The role of cities in economic development
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you go to the IGC web site, you will discover the BREAD-IGC virtual PhD-level course in economics. The topic for 2024 is urbanisation and the econo...
S4 Ep42: Can we use experiments to understand institutions?
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Institutions help to determine economic growth. But studying how they do this using the rigorous experimental techniques popularised in the credibilit...
S4 Ep41: What can we learn from food economics?
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A new open access textbook called Food Economics analyses the connections between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and ...
S4 Ep40: How connecting firms to markets can promote economic development
09 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Small businesses in LMICs provide most of the employment. But they could provide many more jobs if the best of them could unlock their potential to gr...
S4 Ep39: The gap between education policy and practice
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
More children than ever in LMICs go to school – but they still don’t learn as much as we would want, and the difference between the educational ha...
S4 Ep38: Navigating macroeconomic shocks in sub-Saharan Africa
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since 2020, governments everywhere have had to grapple with the impacts of first Covid-19 and then a series of global shocks, not least the Russian in...
S4 Ep37: How do floods impact economic development?
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dev Patel of Harvard describes Bangladesh as “ground zero for the harmful effects of climate change”. Extreme weather events, particularly floods,...
S4 Ep36: How meritocracy varies across the world
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a meritocracy more people can do jobs that match their skills, making them more productive. It’s not just good for them, it’s good for the econ...
S4 Ep35: Improving access to clean water
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
More people die from contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation than from water-related disasters. What are the consequences if we don’t provid...
S4 Ep34: The past, present and future of development economics
28 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pranab Bardhan of Berkeley has recently published a memoir called Charaiveti: An Academic’s Global Journey. It takes in his childhood in India, and ...
S4 Ep33: Measuring upward mobility in developing countries
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We don’t know much about economic mobility in developing countries compared to the wealthier, data-rich societies which have been the subjects of so...
S4 Ep32: Communicating evidence on education policy
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In May 2024 the world’s largest gathering of education and skills ministers took place in London. Tahir Andrabi was there to meet policymakers in hi...
S4 Ep31: The role of economics in promoting lasting peace
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Conflict destroys people, communities, and entire economies. If we reduce the amount of conflict in the world, we save lives and reduce poverty. Domin...
S4 Ep30: Vocational and apprenticeship training in developing countries
30 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It makes sense that vocational training and apprenticeships would be an effective way to help young people find productive work in the global south. B...
S4 Ep29: How do fathers influence early childhood development?
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mothers traditionally provide most of the care for children in early years. What role do fathers play, what difference would it make if they did more,...
S4 Ep28: Paul Collier: Economics for the left behind
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Collier has for many years challenged the conventional wisdom of development economics, bringing our attention to the real-world impact of polici...
S4 Ep27: Can flexible work bypass gender norms?
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If women in developing countries want to work, what keeps them out of the labour force? Is it the other tasks they have to do, or the expectations of ...
S4 Ep26: Maximising impact: Open Philanthropy's approach to choosing causes
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you want to do good, and do not have unlimited funds, how do you choose? Which places, people, and situations are most deserving? Do you invest in ...
S4 Ep25: Rethinking how we measure extreme poverty
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us can recall when we first discovered there were more than a billion people in the world who lived on “a dollar a day”. This extreme pove...
S4 Ep24: Depression and loneliness among the elderly in LMICs
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In developing countries, we know comparatively little about how well the elderly cope with problems like depression and loneliness. There are few poli...
S4 Ep23: Adaptation on the frontline of climate change
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“There’s only so much adapting you can do with so few resources.” That’s a warning from Asif Saleh, the executive director of BRAC, about the ...
S4 Ep22: How to policymakers interpret different types of evidence?
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How does new evidence influence the beliefs of policymakers, and when do hidden biases of beliefs lead to bad policy decisions? There is more rigorous...