Many developed countries are creating immigration policies designed specifically to attract the most talented migrants. We often assume that when those skilled and educated citizens migrate from low-income countries in search of high-paying opportunities, it causes a “brain drain” in their home countries, delaying or hobbling development. A new article in the journal Science puts that assumption to the test and finds that there is also the possibility of a brain gain at home, as investments in e...
Jul 09, 2025•29 min•Season 6Ep. 27
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 minibus networks, such a distinctive feature of urban transit in developing country cities, can improve their service when there is little room for public investment or regulation. If you have ever tried them, they can seem chaotic, but would require large or small policy tweaks to make them work efficiently, and what would those tweaks be? Lucas has ...
Jul 03, 2025•21 min•Season 6Ep. 26
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 a better understanding of structural change, productivity, and growth in low- and middle-income countries. For many economies in the Global South, fossil fuel extraction has been both a blessing and a curse. Nowhere more so than Nigeria, where oil production generates huge revenues, but also creates an environmental and social burden for the people...
Jul 01, 2025•15 min•Season 6Ep. 25
In October 2024, Prabowo Subianto became president of Indonesia. He inherits the “Golden Indonesia” vision: By the time the country celebrates 100 years of independence in 2045, it aims to be one of the five largest economies in the world. But if Indonesia remains dependent on commodity exports like palm oil, coal, natural gas, and rubber, does it risk getting stuck in the “middle income trap” – too wealthy to compete with low-wage nations, but without the human capital or technology to become a...
Jun 25, 2025•28 min•Season 6Ep. 24
In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney discusses one of Africa’s most persistent development challenges: the low productivity of smallholder farmers. Despite decades of investment, innovation, and policy reform, yields on African small farms remain significantly below those in high-income countries. While the limitations of smallholder models, that doesn’t mean that the problem is easy to solve, not least because the way...
Jun 18, 2025•34 min•Season 5Ep. 6
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 ministers, this year’s theme was & "Building stronger, bolder, better education together." But the context was far from routine. The conference took place against a backdrop of global funding cuts to education programmes—the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that more than 35 million children around the world depend on foreign aid for th...
Jun 11, 2025•30 min•Season 6Ep. 23
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 2015 Brazil became a more equal society, a trend that contrasts with rising inequality during that time in high-income countries. A soon-to-be-published article in the Journal of Economic Literature reviews the research that estimates the reduction, discovers the factors that have contributed to it and the mechanisms that have driven it. Alysson Portell...
Jun 04, 2025•24 min•Season 6Ep. 22
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 evidence base and the risk of unintended consequences. This is not an easy question to research, not least because the underlying technologies are literally changing by the day, while the pace of academic research is often measured in years. One of those researchers is David Yanagizawa-Drott of the University of Zurich. We spoke to him about his hopes a...
May 28, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 21
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme was established in April 2024 as a CEPR research initiative to provide a better understanding of the links between conflict, economic growth, and public policies. One of its themes is the link between conflict and hate speech, social media use, media bias, and propaganda. We need to know more about how media has influenced violence, xenophobia, and recruitment for armed groups. Also, how we can use media sentiment ...
May 21, 2025•19 min•Season 6Ep. 20
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 about impact investing is Yonas Alemu, the founder of Lovegrass Ethiopia, which creates products from teff, a gluten- free grain that's native to Ethiopia and sells them across the world. Yonas abandoned a successful career in investment banking in London to create a business in the country of his birth. He spoke to Tim Phillips about how entrepreneu...
May 14, 2025•33 min•Season 6Ep. 19
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, unavoidably spreading disease. One of the Sustainable Development Goals that you don’t hear about so much is the call to end open defecation by 2030. What progress are we making, and what health improvements are we seeing so far? In the latest of our episodes based on J-PAL’s policy insights, Karen Macours of the Paris School of Economics, also co-...
May 08, 2025•19 min•Season 6Ep. 18
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 harsh working conditions. There have been interventions at the firm level to create safer workplaces, better health, higher job satisfaction. But have they succeeded? And, if these policies succeed in raising worker well-being, is there a cost or a benefit for the employer? In the latest in our collaborations with J-PAL to discuss their policy insig...
May 01, 2025•31 min•Season 6Ep. 17
A large proportion of economic activity takes place in the informal sector in every country, particularly in LMICs. Informality, and the lack of rights and protection that goes with it, affects the families who live in slums, the people who take off-the-books jobs, and the firms that choose to skirt regulations. It also affects the governments who want to increase the size of the formal sector – and the revenue they can collect from it. Gabriel Ulyssea of UCL and Mariaflavia Harari of the Univer...
Apr 24, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 16
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 how did it happen? Tom Vogl of UC San Diego is one of the authors of a paper called simply, “How Poverty Fell”. In it, they use surveys to track the progress out of poverty of individuals and generations, to discover whether this progress has been driven by individuals and families becoming less poor over their lives or by successive generations who...
Apr 17, 2025•22 min•Season 6Ep. 15
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 questions in global development: how can the clean energy transition move forward quickly and equitably, particularly for low- and middle-income countries still grappling with poverty? There is a balance between emissions reductions and economic growth. While wealthy nations historically contributed the most to climate change, LMICs are now under pr...
Apr 15, 2025•39 min•Season 5Ep. 5
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 world. In more than 20 years, what have we learned about how it works, when it works best, and how to implement it at scale? Shameran Abed, the Executive Director of BRAC International talks to Tim Phillips about how the Graduation approach reaches people that other programmes miss, why it works, and how it can be scaled up to meet needs around the w...
Apr 09, 2025•34 min•Season 6Ep. 14
Multinational enterprises in every industry are shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions. These corporate tax havens reduce tax revenues everywhere, but that hits hardest in developing countries where corporate taxes are a larger part of the overall tax take. The International Growth Centre has published a policy toolkit report into corporate tax havens. Ludvig Wier, the author, explains to Tim Phillips how profit shifting works, how a global initiative is reducing the allure of tax havens, and...
Apr 02, 2025•24 min•Season 6Ep. 13
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 programs fail to lead to real job opportunities, and are we asking too much of these programs – or maybe the wrong questions entirely? In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney is joined by Oriana Bandiera, professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Stefano Caria,...
Apr 01, 2025•38 min•Season 5Ep. 4
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 decision is ensuring that they can travel to work without fear of stigma, harassment or violence on public transport. In Pakistan, a study set out to discover whether an offer of safe commuter transport would tempt women who are currently not looking for a job. Kate Vyborny of the World Bank spoke to Tim Phillips from Lahore, where the study took plac...
Mar 27, 2025•24 min•Season 6Ep. 12
How does rising external debt in low-income countries affect the natural capital that sustains our livelihoods? A new paper focuses on three river basins that are vital to the livelihoods and biodiversity of the countries that surround them, suggesting ways that we can both measure and conserve that natural capital in the face of the economic forces that threaten it. Pushpam Kumar of UN Environment Programme talks to Tim Phillips about the alarming rise in the ratio of debt to natural capital fo...
Mar 19, 2025•30 min•Season 6Ep. 11
Geopolitical alliances are changing rapidly. Technological innovation is reshaping our economies. These trends offer a cocktail of risk and reward for countries in the global south. They are also both topics that are familiar to Simon Johnson of MIT. Simon speaks to Tim Phillips about how policy in developing countries should respond to President Trump’s deglobalization agenda, how artificial intelligence changes the future for all countries, and where growth and jobs will come from in the futur...
Mar 12, 2025•33 min•Season 6Ep. 10
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 humanitarian aid, and almost 15 million people have been displaced. The war has also devastated the digital infrastructure in Sudan, deepening the crisis. African Renaissance Ventures is a VC firm that backs entrepreneurs who use technology to solve major development challenges. Magdi Amin tells Tim Phillips about how its infrastructure might be restored, a...
Mar 05, 2025•26 min•Season 6Ep. 9
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 and public unrest caused Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister, to resign and flee to India. An interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus, took over. Six months on, Bangladesh’s political and economic future is unclear. Imran Matin, Executive Director, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), is one of the experts in Bangladesh wh...
Feb 26, 2025•23 min•Season 6Ep. 8
With populist politicians taking power around the world, policymakers are relying less on research and expertise, as their political narratives prioritise emotion and identity over facts. This may have long-term consequences for global development: not least in the US, where the Agency for International Development has been dismantled, with thousands of staff laid off. Critical development programs have been halted, and the future of US foreign assistance is in limbo. In the latest episode of th...
Feb 24, 2025•42 min•Season 5Ep. 3
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 don’t receive the transfer? Eeshani Kandpal of the Center for Global Development is one of the researchers who has investigated this topic. She talks to Tim Phillips about the conclusions of her own research, the insights of other economists, and the implications for policy.
Feb 19, 2025•26 min•Season 6Ep. 7
How does a healthy ecosystem benefit humanity? How does the normal functioning of the economy impact natural habitats and animal populations? And what are the costs and benefits of conservation? Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago works at the intersection of economics and conservation. He speaks to Tim Phillips about how economic growth often has a hidden environmental cost. Read the full show notes on VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/energy-environment/economics-ecosystems-how-nature-and-e...
Feb 12, 2025•36 min•Season 6Ep. 6
The Reducing Conflict and Improving Performance in the Economy (ReCIPE) programme, established in April 2024, aims to provide a better understanding of the links between conflict, economic growth, and public policies. One of its many themes is on what happens post-conflict: peacemaking, peacebuilding, and reconstruction. Salma Mousa and Lisa Hultman, theme leaders, talk to Tim Phillips about why peacebuilding must always be both bottom-up and top-down if it is going to work. Read the full show n...
Feb 05, 2025•31 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Published this week: the latest VoxDevLit covers microfinance. After many decades, microfinance is pervasive and popular in developing countries but is often controversial. What have we learned about what works, how it works, and who it helps – and what is there still to understand? Authors Simon Quinn, Muhammad Meki, and Jing Cai talk to Tim Phillips about the problems of evaluation, the surprising uses to which microfinance has been put, and the lessons that policymakers can learn from the sto...
Jan 30, 2025•31 min•Season 6Ep. 4
In 2018, “Unorthodox policies for unorthodox times” was the title of the first in a series of blogs published by the International Growth Centre. The authors argued that the environment for development had changed, and so development policies should change too. Seven years on, as delegates gather in Davos for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, how prescient was the analysis in these articles, and what does this mean for future growth policy? Tim Dobermann and Francesco Caselli ...
Jan 22, 2025•30 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Many development economists would argue that the most important innovation of the last two decades has been a commitment to use only rigorous evidence for policy, and usually what they mean is evidence generated by RCTs. But are systematic reviews of the results a useful guide to policy? And should development economics continue to be focusing so much on the programmes that flow from RCT- driven research? Lant Pritchett of LSE talks to Tim Phillips about the nature of “rigorous” evidence in deve...
Jan 15, 2025•29 min•Season 6Ep. 2
