Ideas in Development

Ideas in Development
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Conversations on the forces shaping economic development.

  1. ٧ يوليو

    Has development economics lost its way?

    What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions? Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics. In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem. Read the full show notes on the Ideas in Development Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

    Has development economics lost its way?

  2. ٣٠ يونيو

    How global supply chains are built – and how to actually attract investment

    Bill McRaith spent his career building supply chains – from 1980s Britain, to a factory in Panyu, China in 1990, to Ethiopia three decades later. He joins Oliver Hanney to explain what really attracts manufacturing investment to a developing economy, and why the model most countries are targeting no longer exists. In this wide-ranging conversation we cover why China’s industry grew; why responsive local governments beat tax holidays; the collapse of the wage gap; how Ethiopia was chosen as a beachhead; and why apparel remains the right first-mover industry for countries not yet on the industrialisation road. Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

    How global supply chains are built – and how to actually attract investment

  3. ٢٣ يونيو

    Stefan Dercon on elite bargains and kickstarting economic growth (via the AUL Podcast)

    Slightly different episode today. This is a repost of a recent episode on the Africa Urban Lab's podcast, in which Kurtis Lockhart (who co-hosted our Cities series) interviews Stefan Dercon - very much an episode I wish I'd recorded! You can watch this episode on the AUL's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGamGT2Z-RM&list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHH Stefan Dercon, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and former Chief Economist at the UK’s Department for International Development (now FCDO), joins Kurtis Lockhart to discuss what it takes for cities and countries to kickstart economic growth, exploring in particular Stefan’s recent work operationalizing elite bargains in the real world. It’s a grounded conversation on why growth and development depend not only on planning and policy, but on the politics that make growth possible. All AUL Podcast episodes available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHH We will resume our usual schedule next week!

    Stefan Dercon on elite bargains and kickstarting economic growth (via the AUL Podcast)

  4. ١٦ يونيو

    Moving billions towards evidence

    In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process. In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence. Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID. Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

    Moving billions towards evidence

  5. ٩ يونيو

    How Ethiopia reformed its economy

    Ethiopia is one of Africa's most ambitious bets on export-led manufacturing. It’s also the site of one of the continent's boldest recent macroeconomic reform programmes. In this episode of the Ideas in Development series on growth, Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran speak with Mamo Mihretu, the tenth Governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia and a former senior economic advisor to the prime minister. Having viewed Ethiopia’s economic change through various lenses, Mamo explains why Ethiopia's industrial parks succeeded where others stalled, what it took to attract anchor investors, and how the central bank prepared, sequenced and executed reform under acute economic pressure. Our conversation ranges across the limits of debt-financed, public-investment-led growth; the institutions behind the industrial-parks programme; why the most credible, not the cheapest, wins investment; the macroeconomic foundations for a thriving economy; and the lessons for any government embarking on an ambitious growth agenda – diagnostics, sequencing, communication, and ownership. Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

    How Ethiopia reformed its economy

  6. ٢ يونيو

    Aggregating evidence

    The conversation about evidence-based policy usually asks why good evidence isn't shaping decisions. But we should also be asking, is the evidence base itself actually worthy of shaping policy? In this episode of Ideas in Development, Rafe Meager – Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and one of the leading meta-analysts in economics – explains why a single paper is not a proof, why we should learn to respect statistical noise, and why a result that holds in Kenya may or may not hold in Ghana. We walk through Rafe’s work aggregating microcredit RCTs, and their research with Noam Angrist and Youth Impact showing that how well a programme is implemented predicts how well it works. Often, the right question for policymakers is not ‘does this work?’ but ‘can my system actually deliver this?’ We also discuss the research process in social sciences, some rules of thumb for interpreting a single causal claim, and why the public should be empowered to understand that evidence comes in different qualities. Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/ Check out Rafe’s research: https://sites.google.com/view/rachaelmeager/home

    Aggregating evidence

  7. ٢٦ مايو

    The evidence gap on evidence use

    Development economics has built a large empirical evidence base across a range of topics and policies – but how, when and where is it being used? We often assume that evidence will have an impact, but have surprisingly few answers to these key questions. Michelle Rao, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, joins us for the first episode of our new Ideas in Development series on evidence. We discuss her own research on these questions, which looks at whether evaluations of conditional cash transfers in Latin American and Caribbean countries influenced government spending. Then we cover what we currently know about the routes from research to impact, why the political economy of evidence use has been so under-studied, and what a research agenda on evidence use should look like. Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/ Check out Michelle’s research: https://www.michellerao.com/research

    The evidence gap on evidence use

  8. ٢١ مايو

    Why Dani Rodrik changed his mind on manufacturing

    This episode might sound a little different to normal, as it was recorded live.For decades, the standard prescription for growth in developing countries was clear: industrialise. Dani Rodrik used to argue that manufacturing was the escalator that could lift workers out of low productivity, and economies out of poverty. So what happens when the escalator stops working? Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, joins Ideas in Development to explain why he has become a manufacturing skeptic, what the evidence from Ethiopia, India and beyond tells us about where growth is actually coming from, and what an industrial policy fit for a services-led future should look like. Read the full show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

    Why Dani Rodrik changed his mind on manufacturing
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Conversations on the forces shaping economic development.

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    Ideas in Development
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    © VoxDev
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    Ideas in Development

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