VoxDev Development Economics

Oct 30 2024 226 ep. 20 mins 1.4k
VoxDev Development Economics Podcast artwork

Hear about the cutting edge of development economics from research to practice.

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S4 Ep43: The role of cities in economic development

Oct 30 2024 23 mins  
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 economics of cities in low and middle-income countries. Ed Glaeser and Diego Puga gave the first talk, about the dynamic city. They talk to Tim Phillips about what attracts people to cities, how those cities constantly change and adapt to

S4 Ep42: Can we use experiments to understand institutions?

Oct 23 2024 30 mins  
Institutions help to determine economic growth. But studying how they do this using the rigorous experimental techniques popularised in the credibility revolution is difficult. A new review highlights an exciting new wave of empirical research into the consequences of institutional change. Michael Callen and Jonathan Weigel talk to Tim Phillips about how we can do experiments about

S4 Ep41: What can we learn from food economics?

Oct 16 2024 32 mins  
A new open access textbook called Food Economics analyses the connections between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and retail markets. It covers how food is produced, brought to market, and sold. But it also looks at consumption: why many have too little food, and the problems caused by malnutrition. Will Masters and Amelia Finaret, the authors, tell

S4 Ep40: How connecting firms to markets can promote economic development

Oct 09 2024 19 mins  
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 grow. In the latest of our series of VoxDev Talks based on J-PAL special reports, Tim Phillips talks to David Atkin about how we can do a better job of connecting firms and entrepreneurs to markets. Read the full show notes here: https

S4 Ep39: The gap between education policy and practice

Oct 03 2024 18 mins  
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 haves and the have-nots is widening. Noam Angrist joins Tim Phillips to talk about the size of the gap between education policy and practice, why it exists, why economic development alone isn’t closing it, and how we can improve polic

S4 Ep38: Navigating macroeconomic shocks in sub-Saharan Africa

Sep 25 2024 39 mins  
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 invasion of Ukraine. The challenges have been particularly acute in Africa. Christopher Adam has seen the impacts of these shocks at first hand – and has also advised some of the people who have been making policy in Africa to mitigat

S4 Ep37: How do floods impact economic development?

Sep 18 2024 28 mins  
Dev Patel of Harvard describes Bangladesh as “ground zero for the harmful effects of climate change”. Extreme weather events, particularly floods, are already affecting the lives of millions of people who live there and are making life more difficult for the country’s farmers. He tells Tim Phillips how he harnessed machine learning to create for the first time reliable global

S4 Ep36: How meritocracy varies across the world

Sep 11 2024 17 mins  
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 economy too. So how effective are the policies that try to make countries more meritocratic? Oriana Bandiera and Ilse Lindenlaub tell Tim Phillips how much productivity countries are sacrificing because the wrong people are in the wrong j

S4 Ep35: Improving access to clean water

Sep 04 2024 22 mins  
More people die from contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation than from water-related disasters. What are the consequences if we don’t provide safe drinking water, especially for children, and what technologies and policies can accelerate that change? In the first of a series of VoxDev Talks based on J-PAL Policy Insights, Pascaline Dupas of Princeton, also Scientific Dire

S4 Ep34: The past, present and future of development economics

Aug 28 2024 38 mins  
Pranab Bardhan of Berkeley has recently published a memoir called Charaiveti: An Academic’s Global Journey. It takes in his childhood in India, and his academic career in the UK, India and the US. The book takes in topics as diverse as whether the questions Marx asked are still relevant today, what economists can learn from anthropologists, what the Chinese government got right (