VoxDev Development Economics

21:23

S7 Ep49: Follow the paper trail

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/10/01

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

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26:41

S7 Ep48: How politicians co-opt bureaucrats

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/29

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

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49:40

Ideas in Development: How BRAC partners with...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/25

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:

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40:10

S7 Ep47: No Taxation without Administration

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/23

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

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42:12

S7 Ep46: Rethinking development cooperation: The case...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/16

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

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37:52

S7 Ep45: Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/09

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

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33:38

S7 Ep44: Fifty years of Chinese growth: The...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/09/02

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

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35:23

S7 Ep43: Caste, race, and power: The barriers to...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/08/26

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

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26:43

S7 Ep42: Masculinity norms and their economic...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/08/19

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

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63:37

S7 Ep41: How global supply chains are built

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/08/14

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:

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26:25

S7 Ep40: Using mobile phones to support teachers,...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/08/12

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

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50:46

S7 Ep39: Ideas in Development: Moving billions to...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/08/06

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:

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30:28

S7 Ep38: How AI can put 20 years of development...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/29

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

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33:57

S7 Ep37: Why businesses stay small in emerging markets

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/22

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

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30:08

S7 Ep36: Climate Change Politics in Developing Countries

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/15

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

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52:42

S7 Ep35: Ideas in Development: Has development...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/10

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:

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23:01

S7 Ep34: Why farmers struggle to adopt new...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/08

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

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29:57

S7 Ep33: Interpersonal violence costs the world more...

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/07/01

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

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20:38

S7 Ep32: Courts in the Global South

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/06/24

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

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31:53

S7 Ep31: Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics

VoxDev Development Economics ·

2026/06/18

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

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