Episodes
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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 interpersonal violence, meaning homicide, intimate partner violence and severe physical abuse of children, kills and injures more people than war, and costs society more too. Large-scale collective violence hits very few countries in any year. Almost every country carries rates of homicide and assault that exceed the global average for war.
Fearon's argument is not that war does not matter. It is that the interpersonal violence is less dramatic and often hidden from view. There is evidence on what works to reduce it, but we aren't giving the problem the attention it needs.
The book behind this episode:
Hoeffler, Anke, and James D. Fearon. 2026. Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and James Fearon. 2026. "Interpersonal violence costs the world more than" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
About James Fearon
James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research spans civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, the evaluation of foreign aid and institution building, and the costs of collective and interpersonal violence. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.The book is co-authored with Anke Hoeffler, professor of development research at the University of Konstanz and co-author of Breaking the Conflict Trap, whose work on the economics of civil war includes the influential conflict-trap research with Paul Collier.
Research and concepts discussed in this episode
Interpersonal versus collective violence. The book distinguishes collective violence, perpetrated by organised groups such as states, rebel organisations, terrorists, or criminal gangs, from interpersonal violence, committed by individuals. Interpersonal violence is broken down into homicide, intimate partner violence, and severe physical abuse of children. The central finding is that the average annual cost of interpersonal violence is far larger than that of interstate and civil war, somewhere between five and 20 times larger, with a best estimate of about eight times.Prevalence, not intensity. The reason interpersonal violence costs more in aggregate is that it is far more widespread. Very few countries experience large-scale collective violence in any given year, but almost all countries carry annual death and injury rates from homicide, intimate partner violence, and child abuse that exceed global average war death and injury rates. For 2000 to 2019, the authors estimate a global annual average of not quite 1.5 deaths per 100,000 people from war and terrorism, against about 7 per 100,000 for homicide.
Intimate partner violence. The authors estimate global annual averages of about 3,300 and 1,600 per 100,000 people for intimate partner physical and sexual assault respectively, which is roughly twice those rates for women specifically.
Severe physical abuse of children. Measured conservatively, capturing beatings far more serious than a mild spanking, the estimates imply that 15% of children aged 14 or younger are subjected to monthly beatings that would be classed as assaults if the victims were adults.
Economic costs versus well-being costs. Civil war can cause severe economic devastation in the worst-affected countries, mainly through reduced growth, and at the global level the strictly economic costs of collective violence may exceed those of interpersonal violence. But economic loss is only one cost. Drawing on methods that use what people pay to avoid risks of death or injury, the authors estimate well-being losses that are far greater for interpersonal violence, because it kills and injures so many more people each year. The authors note that the difficulty of estimating the economic cost of interpersonal violence means their figures probably understate it relative to collective violence.
Why interpersonal violence stays invisible. National media and political debate focus far more on collective violence, partly because it is dramatic and episodic while interpersonal violence is persistent and, happening inside households, often practically invisible. Sustained public and policy attention on the scale of interpersonal violence is itself a step towards reducing its costs.
It is not just "culture". Against the view that little can be done because interpersonal violence is cultural, the authors point to a broad range of programmes and policies with evidence behind them. For homicide and intimate partner violence, measures that reduce alcohol access and consumption. For intimate partner violence and child abuse, adolescent dating programmes and parenting programmes. Across all forms, police reform to improve accountability and training, and more police in countries with low ratios of police to homicides.
Reducing collective violence. There is reasonable evidence that UN peacekeeping operations are a relatively inexpensive way to lower violence in civil war countries and to reduce the chance of war resuming after a peace agreement. The authors note that rising conflict among the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, and sharpening regional rivalries among larger states in conflict-affected areas, have sharply reduced the prospects for new peacekeeping operations for now.
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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 of Maryland) joins Tim Phillips to review the evidence on what courts in the Global South actually do, and who they help. Where the state is weak, customary elders, NGOs, even rebel groups step in to adjudicate, and people often trust these forums more than the state's own courts.
Taliban courts in Afghanistan upheld due process during civil war. Dictators sometimes build genuinely independent courts, because property rights attract investment and citizens' lawsuits tell the centre what local officials are doing.
The research behind this episode:
Rios-Figueroa, Julio, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2025. "Courts in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 28.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2026. "Courts in the Global South." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Fiona Shen-Bayh is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland. Her research spans authoritarian regimes, judicial politics, and the use of legal and judicial institutions as instruments of power, often drawing on digitised archives and text-as-data methods. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press) won the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize.The paper is co-authored with Julio Rios-Figueroa, Professor in the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), whose work spans comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies, with a focus on Latin America.
Research cited in this episode
The triad logic of conflict resolution. Drawn from Martin Shapiro's Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (1981). A court is effective when two parties appeal to a third to settle their dispute, and three conditions hold: the parties believe the third party is impartial; the third party is neutral, not predisposed to favour either side; and the rationale for the decision is consistent with existing norms, the idea of precedent. The review deliberately relaxes the assumption that courts are effective only when all three conditions are met.The rule of law revival. The wave of good-governance programmes promoted by the United States and Western European governments and NGOs after the fall of the Soviet Union, presenting strong courts as a remedy for corruption, instability, and tyranny in the Global South.
The fallacy of legalism. The belief that creating law through statute, legislation, or precedent is enough to bring about social change. The phrase, from Sandra Joireman's work on property rights in Africa, names a habit of thought rooted in the Western experience, where the state has historically enforced property rights and contracts. In much of the Global South the absence of the state does not mean the absence of rules and order.
Stateness. The extent to which a state exercises authority across its territory: its monopoly on violence in the classic Weberian sense, but also the creation of law and the administration of public affairs. Where stateness is low, non-state actors fill the judicial vacuum.
Taliban and Islamic State courts. Recent fieldwork-based research finds that Sharia courts run by the Taliban in Afghanistan upheld notable degrees of due process and impartiality, offering predictability during civil war, and that the coercion associated with the Taliban featured in only a minority of the cases their courts heard.
Courts in authoritarian regimes. A growing literature shows what courts do for dictators: establish credible property rights that attract foreign capital; monitor administrative conflict, as in China, where citizens' grievances against the state feed information upward to the centre; and, at other times, repress opponents or legitimise the regime by delivering popular moral outcomes even against the letter of the law.
Political competition and judicial independence. Electoral competition can sustain independent courts in healthy democracies, partly because divided governments struggle to coordinate against unfavourable rulings. Under instability or an expected change of regime, the relationship can reverse: incumbents pack courts to entrench their interests before leaving, and judges may rule strategically to align with whoever they expect to hold power next, a pattern visible across Latin America.
Access to justice and legal mobilisation. Social transformation through courts depends on people developing a "legal conscience", an understanding of the law and how to use it, and on support structures outside the judiciary: civil society organisations, bar associations, prosecutors, lawyers, and human rights groups that help citizens bring and sustain claims.
Courts and democratic backsliding. Courts hold neither the purse nor the sword, which makes them easy targets for hostile rhetoric, legislative threats, pressure to resign, and court-packing. Courts that are neither impartial nor neutral can still stabilise a democracy while rival parties remain uncertain of each other's intentions, provided both still accept competitive elections. Once a party, especially an incumbent, abandons that commitment, there is little a court can do alone.
Digitised judicial data. The digitisation and free publication of court records across the Global South has opened large-scale, fine-grained study of everyday jurisprudence, useful to scholars and to the judges, lawyers, and litigants who can now see how the law works in their own context.
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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 less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.
The research behind this episode:
Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Soledad Artiz Prillaman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).The paper is co-authored with Peace A. Medie, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.
Research cited in this episode
Elite and nonelite women. The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.The income puzzle. At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.
Vote agency. Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.
Varieties of patriarchy. All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.
Quotas. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.
Collective action. Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.
More from VoxDev
Where are the Indian female politicians?, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.Related reading on VoxDev
Grassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.
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This episode follows a wide-ranging panel convened at Stanford's King Center on Global Development, featuring Gyude Moore, as well as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, former USAID Administrator and Ambassador Mark Green, and Chair and Founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility Vera Songwe - The future of global development: Approaches and partnerships for a new reality.
Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa will fall by between 16% and 28% this year, according to the IMF. In past downturns, multilateral and humanitarian funding tended to fill the gap when bilateral aid dropped. This time those channels are shrinking too.
Gyude Moore, who ran the Liberian President's Delivery Unit under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, thinks the contraction is structural rather than a passing effect of the Trump administration, and that recipient countries should stop expecting the old arrangement to return. He wants economic growth put at the centre of development rather than treated as one programme among several. Instead of letting donors decide which programmes are run, he says, countries should run a growth diagnostic: a way of identifying the two or three constraints doing most to hold an economy back. Governments can then reorganise their budgets around removing those constraints, and use the diagnostic to decide which offers of aid to take and which to turn down. Moore calls this “sovereignty through analytics”. Aid was meant to be temporary, he argues, and the job now is to quickly reach the point of not needing it.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and W. Gyude Moore. 2026. "The end of aid dependency.” VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
W. Gyude Moore is a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was Liberia's minister of public works from December 2014 to January 2018, and before that deputy chief of staff to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and head of the President's Delivery Unit, which oversaw more than $1 billion of road, power and port projects in a country rebuilding after civil war. He also lectures at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. His work covers African infrastructure, energy, industrial policy and development finance.Cited in this episode
The scale of the cuts. The IMF's October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa, using OECD figures, projects bilateral aid to the region falling by 16% to 28% in 2025, with more cuts likely. Moore says the cuts to multilateral and humanitarian funding run higher again, and that the most aid-dependent countries have been hit hardest, through weaker health, education and nutrition systems.Growth diagnostics. A way of finding the constraints that matter most: the one or two that, once removed, allow others to ease. Moore likens it to a doctor running tests before prescribing. The method is associated with the Growth Lab at Harvard. He suggests governments hire an independent party to run the analysis, so the findings cannot be dismissed as political.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation. A US agency that runs what it calls a constraints analysis, then funds the removal of the constraint it finds. Moore offers it as an existing model for diagnostic-led aid, while noting that it has critics.
Sovereignty through analytics. Moore's phrase for using a credible diagnostic to set the terms with donors. A government can say what it is trying to do, ask for help where it needs it, and decline what does not fit. He points to Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe rejecting or walking away from US health agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy as evidence that recipient governments now have that leverage and are willing to use it.
The Development Alliance. Liberia's attempt, around 2014 and 2015, to bring every donor and NGO into one room to map who was doing what, spot duplication and find the sectors nobody was covering. Moore's assessment: useful, but voluntary, not written into law, and not built around a single diagnostic. His conclusion is that such a framework should be put on a legal footing.
Five-year plans. Moore, who teaches in China each autumn, points to the discipline that fixed planning periods impose, and argues that legislation can do a similar job of holding a development strategy steady across changes of government.
Delivery units. Small teams set up to push complex projects through where the wider bureaucracy cannot. Moore ran one in the Liberian presidency and calls them islands of competence; he offers them as a way around weak implementation.
The European politics of aid. Moore's reason for thinking the window may close. Nativist parties are gaining ground across Europe, from the AfD to Reform UK to the PVV in the Netherlands, and an ageing population will pull more public money homeward. Countries that do not adjust, he warns, may find the external funding gone.
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It's 1990. A young staff economist walks into a director's office at the World Bank and says the number he's about to publish is "crazy". The director tells him not to worry about it.
The number was the dollar-a-day poverty line. Lant Pritchett, now of LSE, was that economist. More than three decades later, he's still worrying about it. In this week’s episode he argues that the dollar-a-day line warped how the world thinks about poverty, by setting the bar so low that we can count billions of deprived people as not poor.
In a new paper, co-authored with Martina Viarengo (Graduate Institute, Geneva), their fix isn't to scrap the low line. It's to add a high one as well. They propose a global upper-bound poverty line of $21.50 a day, ten times the extreme-poverty standard, derived from four separate measures of material wellbeing.
Above it, you're no longer poor by any reasonable global standard. Below it, you're poor in a sense worth measuring. By that standard, 99% of Pakistan is poor, and almost no one in Denmark is. Should that affect how we think about anti-poverty policy?
The research behind this episode:
Pritchett, Lant, and Martina Viarengo. Forthcoming. "Raising the Bar: An Inclusive Global Poverty Line." Journal of Development Economics. Available now as a working paper.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Lant Pritchett. 2026. "What the $1-a-day global poverty line gets wrong." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Lant Pritchett is a development economist and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. He worked at the World Bank from 1988 to 2007 and taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades. His work spans economic growth, state capability, education systems, and labour mobility.The paper is co-authored with Martina Viarengo, Professor of International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research spans public policy, labour markets, comparative education, and international migration.
Research cited in this episode
The dollar-a-day poverty line. Created for the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report on poverty and based on the observation that national poverty lines in the poorest countries clustered at a low floor (Ravallion, Datt and van de Walle 1991). Updated for inflation, it now sits at P$2.15 a day in 2017 purchasing power parity. It was only ever meant to mark the lowest a global poverty line could plausibly be, not the line.The focus axiom. A standard property of poverty measures, originating with Amartya Sen (1976), under which changes in the income of anyone above the poverty line do not register in the measure. Pritchett's objection is that this assigns mathematically zero weight to the near-poor; a household just above the line counts the same as a Danish millionaire, namely zero. He calls it an economic bug that became a political feature, because it takes global redistribution off the table.
Gresham's law applied to poverty. Pritchett's framing for how the simple headcount displaced richer, distribution-sensitive approaches; bad economics drove out better economics because it was easier to understand. He notes the World Bank of the 1970s was preoccupied with distribution, citing Hollis Chenery and Montek Ahluwalia's Redistribution with Growth (1974), so the idea that economists ignored distribution until poverty measurement arrived is a myth.
The two criteria for an upper bound. The proposed line rests on two ideas drawn from the tension between the focus axiom and standard welfare economics. One, material wellbeing achievement; the line sits where a household reaches a standard of living a rich-country citizen would recognise as adequate. Two, near enough satiation; the line sits where the extra wellbeing from another dollar has fallen so low that treating further gains as zero does little violence to reality. At twenty-one and a half dollars the marginal utility of income is roughly three percent of its value at the dollar-a-day line; at the World Bank's current high line of P$6.85 it is still around thirty percent.
Four measures of wellbeing. The number is triangulated across an iso-elastic utility function, food shares in consumption (Engel's Law), a household index of six basic conditions drawn from Demographic and Health Survey data, and a cross-national index of basics. The estimates cluster between twenty and forty dollars a day; twenty-one and a half was chosen because it is exactly ten times the dollar-a-day line, a focal point in the same way one dollar was.
The six minimal conditions of prosperity. Electricity, improved sanitation, safe water, primary schooling completed by older children, no child dying under five, and no young child malnourished. The test Pritchett applies is whether it would be absurd to call a household prosperous while it lacks one of them.
The rich of the poor and the poor of the rich. The tenth percentile in Denmark has higher consumption than the ninetieth percentile in Pakistan or Indonesia. This is why any global line that produces meaningful poverty in rich countries implies poverty rates near one hundred percent across most of the developing world; a point Dani Rodrik (2007) showed is widely misunderstood.
The prosperity gap. A distribution-sensitive welfare measure adopted by the World Bank (Kraay et al. 2025) that weights the whole income distribution rather than counting everyone above a threshold as zero. Pritchett offers it, alongside poverty-gap and squared-poverty-gap measures at a higher line, as the practical route to acting on a global upper bound without reducing everything to a single headcount.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
Rethinking evidence and refocusing on growth in development economics, Lant Pritchett on what the problem might be if we rely exclusively on rigorous evidence in development economics as a guide for policy.Rethinking how we measure extreme poverty, Charles Kenny asks: is it time for a new measure of extreme poverty?
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Every civil service reform plan opens with the same list of complaints: poor performance, low motivation, weak accountability. Across six African countries and three decades, governments launched 131 separate reform efforts; not one fully achieved what it set out to do.
Martin Williams spent more than a decade working alongside Ghana's civil service before writing a book called Reform as Process that analyses the lessons from his experience, and the rest of the 131 reforms. For example, 34 programmes across six countries tried to link civil service pay to performance; none delivered. One lesson is that formal rules and accountability systems cannot govern what matters in a civil service: innovation, adaptation, co-ordination, the willingness to act on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Meaningful reforms often require no money at all. They require changing expectations from inside, starting small and building credibility, decentralising the leadership of change, and treating new formal rules as a last resort rather than a first step.
The book behind this episode:
Williams, Martin J. 2026. Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies. New York: Columbia University Press. Open-access PDF available at uplopen.com.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Martin J. Williams. 2026. "Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works)." VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Martin J. Williams is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His research spans the politics and management of policy implementation, public service delivery, and bureaucratic reform, with a sustained focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He previously worked as an economist in Ghana's Ministry of Trade and Industry as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow, and as a Senior Researcher at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Cape Town. Reform as Process has been shortlisted for the Douglass North Award for best book in institutional and organizational economics.Research cited in this episode
Non-verifiable tasks. In organizational economics, a verifiable action is one where a third party (an auditor, a judge, an administrative tribunal) can determine objectively whether it was performed correctly. Non-verifiable tasks are those where no such determination can be made; they include innovation, adaptation, co-ordination across teams, and acting on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Williams draws on this framework, which originates in contract theory, to explain why formal accountability systems consistently fall short: they can only govern verifiable outputs, leaving the full range of non-verifiable tasks unaddressed and, in many cases, actively crowded out.Performance-linked incentive systems. Williams's dataset covers 34 separate reform efforts across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia that attempted to tie civil service pay or progression to measured performance. Not one delivered sustained differentiated incentives on an ongoing basis; only two achieved even partial delivery of rewards, and none delivered sanctions based on measured performance. Williams argues this is not isolated implementation failure but reflects a structural incompatibility between formalised performance metrics and the non-verifiable nature of much civil service work. Managers respond rationally: they set soft targets, award uniform scores, and the process becomes a tick-box exercise.
Projectization of reform. Williams uses this term to describe the dominant approach: treating change as a time-bound, discrete intervention with its own budget, acronym, and implementing team, conceived separately from the organisation's core work. This approach systematically distorts reform goals towards formally measurable outputs (new policies, new laws) rather than sustained behavioural change, undermines credibility by signalling a predetermined end date, and reinforces the perception among civil servants that reform is a temporary performance before things return to normal.
Continuous improvement. Williams draws an analogy with physical fitness: achieving a target and then stopping does not sustain the gain. High-performing organisations, in the public and private sectors alike, treat improvement as an ongoing process embedded in daily work, not a periodic project handed to a specialist unit. Starting small is not an absence of ambition; it is how credibility is built and larger changes become possible. Williams argues civil service reform should be reconceived on these terms, with performance improvement treated as the job of everyone in the organisation.
Decentralised reform leadership. The dominant model of reform leadership, Williams argues, is a visionary leader driving a top-down plan. This model is counterproductive. It personalises reform in ways that guarantee reversal when the leader moves on, and it cannot reach the day-to-day interactions among the thousands of individuals and hundreds of teams that determine how a civil service actually works. A more effective model is catalysing rather than forcing: creating conditions in which teams can identify and solve their own problems, escalate issues, co-ordinate with each other, and act on ideas for improvement without fear of being ignored or penalised.
More VoxDev Talks episodes
How government analytics can improve public sector implementation, in which Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster discuss their efforts to use the data that already exists in governments to better understand how they function. -
In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story.
East Asia's post-war growth — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and their neighbours — had lifted millions out of poverty in a generation. The report documented the influence of export subsidies, state-directed credit, land reform, and government-business dialogue. But the bank, constrained by the Washington Consensus of the time, underplayed the industrial policies that were at the heart of this miracle.
Nancy Birdsall was head of the department that produced the report. In this week's VoxDev Talk, she looks back, talking to Tim Phillips about whether this stance affected policy in other developing countries.
Birdsall tells Tim Phillips how the report came to exist at all — financed by the Japanese government as a deliberate strategy to expose the bank's economists to a success story their prevailing framework couldn't explain.
With industrial policy back at the centre of economic debate, Birdsall's new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives asks whether the bank missed its moment to embed those lessons into its operational work.
The research behind this episode:
Birdsall, Nancy. 2025. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 39(4): 127–48. A free download is available at the Center for Global Development.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Nancy Birdsall. 2026. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle." VoxDev Talk (podcast). [Episode URL].
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About Nancy Birdsall
Nancy Birdsall is president emerita of the Center for Global Development, which she co-founded in 2001. She was previously executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and, before that, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, where she oversaw the department responsible for the East Asian Miracle report. Her research spans development finance, inequality, economic growth and the role of multilateral institutions in the global economy.Research cited in this episode
The East Asian Miracle (World Bank, 1993). A 400-page study of the economic performance of eight high-performing Asian economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — covering the period 1965 to 1990. Commissioned with Japanese government funding, the report documented both market fundamentals and a range of active state policies; its handling of industrial policy was carefully hedged to remain within the bounds of what the bank's dominant Washington Consensus framework could accept. The full report is available from the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository.
The Washington Consensus. A term coined by economist John Williamson in 1989 to describe the package of macroeconomic and structural reforms — fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and market-determined prices — that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury broadly promoted as the framework for development in the late 1980s and 1990s. The consensus was dominant inside the bank during the period the East Asian Miracle report was written; countries following activist state policies did not fit its categories easily.MITI (Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The Japanese government body responsible for coordinating industrial and trade policy during Japan's post-war growth period, including the direction of credit, protection of infant industries and promotion of heavy manufacturing exports. MITI was widely known inside the bank, but its role in Japan's development was not systematically studied or incorporated into the bank's policy advice until the East Asian Miracle report. It was abolished and reorganised as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2001.
Performance-based credit subsidies. A mechanism used across several East Asian economies in which exporters could access subsidised credit conditional on demonstrating actual export orders. The conditionality — credit only if you are already performing — was central to why the policy worked: it rewarded productive firms and withdrew support from those that failed to deliver. The East Asian Miracle report described this approach in detail without classifying it as industrial policy.
Japan's postal savings system. A government-run savings scheme that channelled household deposits through post offices into state-directed investment, providing below-market returns to savers while funding subsidised credit to targeted sectors. Birdsall notes it as a mechanism worth studying for developing countries seeking to finance industrial support without relying on private capital markets.
Indonesia and the airplane sector. The Indonesian government under Suharto sought to develop a domestic aerospace industry, with state subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). The World Bank's East Asia regional department, which managed the bank's lending relationship with Indonesia, was concerned that the East Asian Miracle report might be read as endorsing this approach. Their pressure to limit the report's treatment of industrial policy is the episode's opening anecdote — and the source of what is possibly the best line in the show.
IDB report on public-private dialogue in Latin America. Birdsall references work by the Inter-American Development Bank on the conditions under which structured dialogue between government bureaucrats and private-sector firms can support industrial policy; she notes that access at the highest levels of government — including the president — appears to be a factor in whether such dialogues produce results.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Industrial policy for economic development, Dani Rodrik on the evidence for active state roles in directing investment and exports, and the institutional prerequisites for making them work.The future of the World Bank: Why knowledge is power, Penny Goldberg on the bank's role as a producer and broker of development knowledge, and how that function has evolved since the Washington Consensus era.
Related reading on VoxDev
Modern industrial policy: The Asian miracles' blueprint, a VoxDev Talk examining how the principles behind East Asian industrial success — performance conditionality, export orientation, technology learning — can be translated into policy frameworks for today's developing economies.Where are we in the economics of industrial policies?, what three decades of research have established about when and why industrial policy works, and what conditions determine whether government intervention helps or hinders.
Implementing industrial policy effectively: Lessons from shipbuilding in China, how policy design and performance conditionality determine whether sector-level support produces lasting productivity gains — the same question at the heart of the East Asian Miracle debate.
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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 and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjXmiaMPabQ
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-perfect-city/id1866874059?i=1000767322240
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MfSc3AWT6lT5jG9kvXW4B?si=371569bc3d374d72
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8902311-the-perfect-city
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/the-perfect-cityWhat does a perfect city look like in a low- or middle-income country – and how do you get there?
In the closing episode of the Ideas in Development cities series, Ed Glaeser joins Kurtis Lockhart and Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on what makes cities work. He sets out the three foundations every city needs (safety, mobility, education), why infrastructure without the right incentives and institutions fails, what 19th-century New York's cholera outbreaks teach Lusaka about water, why “bus good, train bad” still holds, and what the medieval European city has to offer sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing urban regions.
We also discuss the political art of being a great mayor, why "capacity eats policy as a light afternoon snack", and his three priorities for African cities over the next decade.
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Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity?
Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions.
The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear.
Research and references discussed in this episode:
Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan. 2015. "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1): 22–53.
Rana, Annum Ather. 2025. Evidence on the Impact of Microfinance Program on Poverty Reduction and Income Security. Kashf Foundation Focus Note Series, April
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Roshaneh Zafar. 2026. "Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Roshaneh Zafar
Roshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, Pakistan's first specialised microfinance institution. A development economist by training, she worked at the World Bank before leaving to found Kashf in 1996 after training under Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Her work spans microfinance, micro-insurance, women's economic empowerment, low-cost private education and behaviour change communication.Research and context cited in this episode
Grameen Bank and the Grameen model. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983, Grameen Bank pioneered group-based lending to poor women without requiring collateral, on the premise that social accountability within borrower groups could substitute for asset security. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kashf was established as a Grameen replicator but diverged significantly in its approach: hiring women loan officers from the outset, replacing the group hierarchy with a peer partnership model (using the Urdu term baji, meaning sister, for both client and staff), and adapting products for Pakistan's religious, linguistic and cultural diversity.The 2008 microfinance delinquency crisis in Pakistan. Over-indebtedness, predatory lending practices and the absence of a credit information bureau led to a sector-wide delinquency crisis in Pakistan in 2008. Following the crisis, regulators, lenders and the Pakistan Microfinance Network introduced enhanced consumer protection standards and a credit bureau to prevent multiple borrowing. Kashf now limits lending to clients with no more than two active loans from any provider.
Banerjee et al. (2015) randomised controlled trial. The paper, a randomised evaluation of a microcredit expansion in Hyderabad, India by Spandana Sphoorty, found no statistically significant effect on women's empowerment, health, education or consumption over an 18-to-24-month follow-up period. It became the most-cited challenge to microfinance's development impact. Zafar's counter-argument turns on time horizon: empowerment, she argues, is a decade-scale process that short-panel RCTs cannot capture. A University of Minnesota longitudinal analysis of ten years of Kashf client data found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of loans taken and business income, and between savings behaviour and subsequent business investment.
Behaviour change communication: theater and television. Kashf has used street theater for thirty years to communicate on topics including child marriage, girls' education, reproductive health and insurance take-up. After Zafar attended a conference session on the impact of telenovelas on gender norms in Brazil and Mexico, the foundation moved into television drama production, covering topics including child sexual abuse, human trafficking and cybercrime. A child sexual abuse drama prompted a legal notice from PEMRA (the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority), which was successfully contested. The dramas are produced with a media and creative team to ensure sensitive handling of difficult subjects.
The gender bond and gender sukuk. In 2005, Zafar rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The experience prompted a long-term ambition to connect micro women entrepreneurs to capital markets. Kashf subsequently issued a gender bond listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, followed by a gender sukuk (Sharia-compliant bond) listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — the first such instrument linking Pakistani microfinance to international Islamic capital markets.
Low-cost private schools. Research by Kashf found that clients, once they had access to income, were moving their children from public to low-cost private schools; teacher absenteeism in private schools was far lower. Further research showed 70% of these schools were run by women. Kashf began financing them; it now supports over 3,000 such schools, with a requirement that girls constitute at least 50% of enrolment.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Breaking down access constraints faced by women: Experimental evidence from Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how removing specific barriers to vocational training take-up shifts economic participation among women in Pakistan — the supply-side complement to Kashf's demand-side model.How safe transport could unlock women's labour force participation in Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how mobility constraints suppress women's economic activity in urban Pakistan, and how subsidised women-only transport services can shift that.
Related reading on VoxDev
What have we learned about microfinance?, a VoxDev article reviewing the evidence base on microfinance impact, including the conditions under which credit does and does not produce lasting change in household welfare.Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, a VoxDev article on evidence that participation in group lending schemes produces political voice and civic engagement even when economic empowerment effects are limited.
Empowering women through digital financial services, a VoxDev article on how mobile money and digital accounts give women a private, named financial identity — and what that does to their control over household resources.
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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 and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOPG6UmOHGU
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs/id1866874059?i=1000766172534
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BoYX7rfpjn86KndCxsnyd?si=53213815c1fd4408
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8899287-cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/leonard-wantchekon-youth-governance-and-africas-urban-futureAre African cities a powder keg of restless youth – or the most promising place to build prosperity, peaceful politics and shared civic life?
Leonard Wantchekon joins Ideas in Development to argue that African cities should be seen as a youth opportunity, not a youth problem.
We discuss recent unrest in Kenya and Tanzania, his work showing that clientelism is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.
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Between 1959 and 1961, between thirty and forty million people starved to death in China. The Great Famine had many causes, and one of them was a campaign to eradicate sparrows.
Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago tells Tim Phillips about Mao Zedong's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which led to the mass killing of sparrows, set off a chain of consequences that scientists had warned about, but political pressure had silenced. Sparrows eat crops, but they also eat the locusts and other insects that destroy the crops. Remove the sparrows and the pests go unchecked. Wang and his co-authors estimate the eradication cut national grain yields by 8-9%, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total agricultural decline during the famine.
The research behind this episode:
Frank, Eyal G., Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You. 2024. "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China." NBER Working Paper 34087.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Shaoda Wang. 2025. "How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.” VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Shaoda Wang
Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. His research spans environmental economics, political economy and development, with a focus on how state capacity and political incentives shape environmental and health outcomes in China and other developing countries.Research cited in this episode
The Four Pests Campaign (1958). Launched as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the grounds that they ate grain and reduced agricultural yields. Several prominent Chinese scientists warned at the time that removing sparrows would destabilise the food chain by eliminating a key predator of crop pests, particularly locusts. Their advice was ignored. The campaign resulted in the killing of an estimated two billion sparrows.County gazetteers as a data source. Official harvest data reported by local governments to the central government during the Great Leap Forward was heavily inflated; local officials faced strong political incentives to overstate output, and those exaggerated figures contributed to the famine by masking food shortages from central planners. Wang and his co-authors instead use county gazetteers: records compiled by local elites through a bottom-up process with no link to the political reward structures that distorted official reporting. Comparison between the two sources reveals the scale of over-reporting in the official data.
Sparrow habitat suitability index. Rather than relying on reported sparrow kill counts, which were distorted by local officials seeking to demonstrate compliance with campaign targets, the paper constructs an index of how suitable each county's climate and ecological conditions are for sparrow habitation. Counties with high sparrow suitability were more exposed to the shock of eradication; comparing their crop yield and mortality trajectories against low-suitability counties before and after the campaign provides the causal identification strategy. The two groups followed similar trajectories before the campaign; divergence afterwards is attributed to the eradication.
State food procurement as a famine amplifier. The Great Famine was not simply a production shortfall. The central government continued to export food during the famine years because inflated harvest reports gave it no signal of the actual crisis. State procurement quotas extracted grain from rural communities at a time when households were already facing starvation; the political system that caused the sparrow eradication was also the mechanism that amplified its consequences.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
The economics of ecosystems: How nature and economies interact. Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago — a co-author of the sparrows paper — on how to measure the economic value of biodiversity. His research on bats and white-nose syndrome, and on desert locusts, shows what happens when natural pest control collapses; the sparrows episode is the historical counterpart.Related reading on VoxDev
The political economy of policy learning: Evidence from China, a VoxDev article on how misaligned incentives across China's political hierarchy distort policy experimentation and produce systematically exaggerated signals — the same dynamic that inflated both the sparrow kill counts and the harvest figures during the Great Leap Forward.Autocratic rule and social capital: Evidence from Imperial China, a VoxDev article on the long-run effects of political persecution under autocratic rule in China, and how the suppression of dissent shapes economic and social behaviour across generations.
The economics of conservation in low- and middle-income countries, a VoxDev article surveying the evidence on maintaining natural ecosystems, the role of governance, and the costs of losing species whose economic value is not yet understood.
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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 and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKF3aJ96L2o
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-crime-takes-over-cities/id1866874059?i=1000763970538
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1YGI5Q0LDKRCSK8MHBHfEh?si=5EiiP-vbRnOYxoACBDbE0Q
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8895828-how-crime-takes-over-cities
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/how-crime-captures-a-city
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/chris-blattman-how-crime-takes-over-citiesHow does organised crime take over a city – and can mayors act before it does?
Chris Blattman, economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, joins the Ideas in Development cities series to explain how street gangs evolve into powerful criminal confederations, why cities like Medellín can have low homicide rates and still be almost completely captured, and what the "terrible trade-off" between violence, criminal power and political corruption means for policymakers.
We then discuss the perils faced by fast-growing African cities, where the conditions for organised crime to take root are quietly assembling.
Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/
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Decades of agricultural development policy have chased yield. Bigger harvests, better seeds, more fertiliser. But how can we make farming more profitable?
Craig McIntosh of UC San Diego is academic lead on a J-PAL Policy Insight covering twenty-three randomised evaluations of credit and grants for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. He tell Tim Phillips that although yields and revenues often rise, profit rarely responds in the same way. When farmers are already running their farms close to the margin, costs rise at the same rate as income, and the household bank balance does not move much. What can we bundle with credit to change that situation?
The research behind this episode:
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Can relaxing credit constraints boost farmers' profits?” J-PAL Policy Insights. Last modified February 2026. Academic leads: Craig McIntosh and Tavneet Suri; insight authors: Leonie Rauls and Rebecca Toole.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Craig McIntosh. 2026. “Boosting farmers' profits?" VoxDev Talks (podcast).
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About the guest
Craig McIntosh is Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. His research spans development finance, agricultural credit, cash transfer design and the evaluation of large-scale anti-poverty interventions.Research cited in this episode
Microcredit take-up among farmers. Across four randomised evaluations of traditional microcredit aimed at farmers, in Morocco, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Malawi, take-up sat between 13 and 33 percent. Standard microcredit repayment begins a week or two after disbursement, which is incompatible with a crop cycle that pays out cash once or twice a year. Group liability also breaks down in agriculture, where shocks like drought or floods hit borrowers together rather than one at a time.Tailoring credit to the agricultural cycle. Restructured loans push take-up much higher. Nakano and Magezi in Tanzania allowed rice farmers to defer 80 percent of repayment until harvest; 39 percent borrowed and over 92 percent repaid. William Jack and co-authors in Kenya offered dairy farmers asset-collateralised loans for a water tank; take-up reached 44 percent against 2.4 percent for a typical joint-liability product. Lambon-Quayefio, Manjeer and Udry in Ghana offered digital credit with a three-month grace period; 59 percent of farmers took it up.
Sell low, buy high. Burke and co-authors in Kenya showed that smallholders routinely sell at the post-harvest price trough and buy back grain at hungry-season prices 20 to 40 percent higher. Harvest-time loans that allowed farmers to delay sales had take-up of 64 percent and produced returns around 29 percent for borrowers. Treated villages also saw flatter price trajectories, generating spillover benefits for non-borrowers.
Lean-season credit. Fink, Jack and Masiye in Zambia found that lean-season loans let farmers stop hiring out their labour and instead work their own land. Output rose by 9 percent. Loan repayments were comparable to the gain, leaving farmers roughly even on profits.
Selection into credit markets. Beaman, Karlan, Thuysbaert and Udry in Mali first offered loans, then offered grants to those who had refused. Returns to capital among would-be borrowers were on the order of 130 percent. Returns among those who had refused the loan were close to zero. Credit appears to self-target toward farmers who can use it productively, which is regressive in welfare terms and also exactly what a capital-scarce economy needs credit markets to do.
Input subsidy programmes (ISPs). Jayne and co-authors reviewed eighty studies of fertiliser subsidies across sub-Saharan Africa. Yields rise while subsidies are in place; profitability is mixed; targeting is frequently politically distorted, often skewed toward better-connected or wealthier farmers. The standout randomised exception is Carter, Laajaj and Yang in Mozambique, where two-thirds of recipients had never used fertiliser before; the programme produced sustained gains and a high benefit-cost ratio. By contrast, Gignoux and co-authors in Haiti found a fertiliser-voucher subsidy crowded out farmers' own input spending and lowered yields once the subsidy ended.
Cash transfers and diversification. In six studies measuring both farm and non-farm outcomes, three found households doubled down on agriculture and three saw movement into non-farm enterprises. The Zambian Child Grant evaluation by Handa and co-authors saw women invest in seeds, fertiliser and livestock and start non-farm businesses, with household income roughly doubling.
Bundled input programmes. Four randomised evaluations bundled credit or a grant with information, training or market access. All four lifted revenues; three of the four lifted incomes or profits. Harou and co-authors in Tanzania showed that fertiliser vouchers alone and soil testing alone did nothing; only the combination raised yields and revenues. Ashraf, Gine and Karlan's Kenya study on French-bean and baby-corn export found credit increased programme participation from 27 to 41 percent, even where it did not further raise income among participants.
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In 2017, Argentina had the highest corporate income tax rate in Latin America. Reducing it was politically popular and economically desirable. Getting it through a Congress where the governing coalition held just 19% of Senate seats, while the fiscal deficit ran at close to 8% of GDP, was a harder problem. A package of reforms was planned, revenue-neutral and phased over five years: corporate tax on reinvested profits would fall from 35% to 25%; a minimum-wage deduction would reduce the payroll tax burden on firms employing informal workers; energy, alcohol, and sugar taxes would be reorganised on rational, emissions-based principles; and provincial governments would agree to phase out the cascading "ingresos brutos" sales tax in exchange for limits on public spending.
In this week’s VoxDev Talk, Sebastian Galiani, who served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina and led the design of the reform, tells Tim Phillips how the Macri government attempted to reform its tax structure, and what it teaches us about policy. Credibility, he says, was the biggest constraint: in a country as economically volatile as Argentina, what matters is not only what the law says, but whether investors believe it will survive a change of government.
The research behind this episode:
Afonso, Santiago, and Sebastian Galiani. 2025. "Motives and Constraints in the Implementation of Argentina's 2017 Tax Reform." NBER Working Paper 34442.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Galiani. 2026. "Argentina's 2017 tax reform." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).
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About the guest
Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. His research spanning political economy, public finance, and Latin American development has examined how institutions, property rights, and fiscal policy shape economic outcomes. He served as Deputy Minister of Economy in Argentina in 2017, where he led the design of the tax reform he examines in this episode.Research cited in this episode
Ingresos brutos is a cascading sales tax levied by Argentina's provincial governments, applied each time a good changes hands along the supply chain. Unlike a value-added tax, it allows no deduction for taxes already paid at earlier stages; the burden compounds with the length of the production chain, making it particularly punishing for manufactured goods that pass through many hands. Galiani's team negotiated a deal under which the provinces agreed to phase this system out over five years and move toward a simpler, less distortive sales tax structure.Second-best reform is the practice of improving a policy system as far as constraints allow rather than designing for the theoretically optimal outcome that cannot be achieved in practice. Galiani frames the 2017 reform explicitly in these terms: the design team mapped the distance between Argentina's actual tax system and optimal taxation, then asked how far they could move in that direction given the fiscal, political, and negotiating constraints they faced. The result departed from the ideal in every dimension; it was nonetheless a genuine improvement on what existed before.
Escape clauses are provisions written into legislation that suspend or modify specific commitments if defined trigger conditions are met. The 2017 reform included several: the inflation adjustment for the calculation of corporate assets, for example, would apply only if inflation continued to fall. Galiani describes escape clauses as essential when designing policy in high-volatility environments where external shocks are not exceptional events but a predictable feature of the landscape.
Related reading on VoxDev
How should economic researchers give policy advice? Stefan Dercon argues that giving second-best advice, taking into account what is politically achievable rather than what is theoretically optimal, often produces better outcomes than the standard model of advocating for the ideal and waiting.How progressive taxation affects tax compliance in developing countries. Reforms that boost progressivity and are effectively communicated can yield higher compliance alongside greater fairness; evidence that the design and communication of a reform matter as much as its content.
Improving payroll-tax compliance through decentralised monitoring: Evidence from Mexico. Evidence that even formal firms evade payroll taxes, and that giving workers the right incentives to monitor their employers' wage reporting can substantially improve compliance; relevant context for Argentina's effort to reduce the payroll tax burden on unskilled workers.
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At the start of every planting season, smallholder farmers needs seeds and fertiliser, but the income from the harvest that would pay for them is many months away. With no credit history and no collateral, banks aren’t going to give credit to farmers.They cope by selling livestock, pledging part of the harvest to a trader at a discount, or turning to neighbours.
Can we do a better job of lending to farmers? Monica Lambon-Quayefio of the University of Ghana tells Tim Phillips about a digital lending product for farmers in southern Ghana shows what this approach can do — but also where it still falls short. Working with Farmerline, a social enterprise that scores creditworthiness from farm and sales data rather than formal records, the trial randomly assigned eligible applicants to receive input loans worth around $40. Farm input expenditures rose by around 11%. But not profits. Find out why in this week’s episode.
The research behind this episode:
Karlan, Dean, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry. 2026. "Access to Digital Credit for Smallholder Farmers: Experimental Evidence from Ghana." Journal of Development Economics 181.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Monica Lambon-Quayefio. 2026. "Can digital credit unlock investment in smallholder farms?" VoxDev Talk
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About Monica Lambon-Quayefio
Monica Lambon-Quayefio is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, where her research focuses on social protection, agricultural technology, and experimental methods in development economics. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Dean Karlan, Utsav Manjeer, and Christopher Udry, all of Northwestern University.More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what Ghana's experience with mobile money reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what it takes for digital finance to reach the very poor.What have we learned about microfinance?: What decades of research have established, where the evidence remains contested, and what the most important open questions are for policymakers thinking about expanding access to credit in low-income settings.
Related reading on VoxDev
The impact of digital credit in low-income countries: an overview of the evidence on how digital lending products affect borrowers, including the risks of overborrowing and the conditions under which short-term digital credit translates into improved economic outcomes.How to boost digital banking adoption and savings in Ghana: evidence on what drives uptake of digital financial services among low-income households in Ghana, and what works when trying to shift behaviour away from informal savings arrangements.
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Rich people live longer than poor people in every country that researchers have studied. In the United States today, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1% of individuals exceeds ten years. The relationship between money and health is steepest at the bottom of the income distribution, where additional resources buy the most: when people are poor, there is a great deal that money can do for their health.
In this week’s episode, Adriana Lleras-Muney of UCLA tells Tim Phillips that the evidence on the relationship between poverty and health is less certain than policymakers tend to assume. Causality runs in both directions: poor health is one of the fastest routes into poverty, and understanding how much of the association flows in each direction is still an active debate. Giving poor people more money does not reliably translate into better health within the timescales and amounts that most experiments can test, because the details matter: how long the transfer lasts, whether it is conditional, and what receiving it signals about a person's economic future all shape what they actually do with it.
The most consistent finding from the policy evidence is that public health insurance and access to cheap, proven preventive interventions tend to deliver more reliable health gains than cash transfers — but whether either works in practice depends heavily on the implementation and the trust that governments can build with the populations they are trying to help.
The research behind this episode:
Lleras-Muney, Adriana, Hannes Schwandt, and Laura R. Wherry. 2025. "Poverty and Health." Annual Review of Economics 17.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2026. "Poverty and Health." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Adriana Lleras-Muney
Adriana Lleras-Muney is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research focuses on health economics and the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and health outcomes across the life course. The paper discussed in this episode is co-authored with Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University) and Laura R. Wherry (NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service).More VoxDev Talks on this topic
The history of cash transfers: Tim Phillips speaks with Ugo Gentilini about his research tracing 2,500 years of giving people money, from Ancient Rome to the COVID pandemic, and what history reveals about the recurring debates over when and why cash transfers work.Improving access to and use of clean water: Tim Phillips speaks with Pascaline Dupas about why access to clean water remains one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available, and the barriers that prevent its wider adoption in low-income settings.
Related reading on VoxDev
Cash transfers reduce adult and child mortality rates in low- and middle-income countries: evidence that unconditional cash transfers have measurable effects on mortality in poor settings, with implications for how we think about the relationship between income and health.Effective health aid: Evidence from Gavi's vaccine programme: what a large-scale vaccination programme reveals about the conditions under which targeted public health interventions can make a lasting difference in low-income countries.
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Eighty years after Indian independence, the economic fingerprint of British colonial rule is still visible at the district level. Two institutions in particular left scars: whether a district was governed directly by British administrators or by one of India's roughly 680 Indian princes, and what kind of land tax arrangement the British put in place. For example, by 1991, directly ruled districts had nine percentage points fewer middle schools and a 20-percentage-point lower probability of having a road than areas under indirect rule. The question was whether those gaps would eventually close.
Lakshmi Iyer of the University of Notre Dame tells Tim Phillips that by 2011 infrastructure gaps had closed completely. Targeted post-independence programmes, including the Minimum Needs Program of the 1970s and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of 2001, pushed schools, health centres, and roads towards underserved districts. The picture for land tenure is mixed. Areas that historically had landlord-based systems are still 17% behind non-landlord areas in wheat yields, and the gap in fertiliser use has widened rather than narrowed. One reason, the policy response was a universal subsidy rather than being specifically aimed at places that had fallen behind.
So colonial legacies can be erased, but only by policies designed to reach the places that were left behind. When policies have equalisation built in, historical gaps disappear. When they do not, the gaps persist.
The research behind this episode:
Iyer, Lakshmi and Coleson Weir. 2025. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" Journal of Development Economics 177.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Lakshmi Iyer. 2026. "The colonial legacy in India: How persistent are the effects of historical institutions?" VoxDev Talk (podcast).
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About Lakshmi Iyer
Lakshmi Iyer is Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Fellow at CEPR. Her research focuses on political economy, governance, and the long-run effects of historical institutions in developing countries. The paper discussed in this episode extends two of her earlier papers, one co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee and one sole-authored, both of which are listed in the research cited section below.Research cited in this episode
Iyer, Lakshmi. 2010. "Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences." Review of Economics and Statistics 92 (4). The original paper documenting that areas brought under direct British rule had significantly lower access to schools, health centres, and roads in the post-colonial period, using Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse as an instrument for the selectivity of British annexation.Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. "History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India." American Economic Review 95 (4). Finds that districts where the British assigned proprietary rights in land to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investment and productivity in the post-independence period than areas where rights went to individual cultivators.
Nunn, Nathan. 2007. "Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment." Journal of Development Economics 83 (1). Develops the theoretical case for why economies displaced into a low-production equilibrium by extraction or oppression can remain there long after the original impetus disappears.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
India's economic development since independence: Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian discuss how India's transformation across eight decades of independence has defied conventional models of development, and what it reveals about the relationship between political economy and growth.Related reading on VoxDev
Drawing the line: The short- and long-term consequences of partitioning India: examines the economic and political legacy of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, and how a boundary drawn in the final weeks of empire continues to shape outcomes on both sides.Historical legacies and African development: surveys the evidence on how pre-colonial political organisation, colonial-era institutions, and the slave trade have shaped the long-run economic geography of sub-Saharan Africa.
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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 series.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ideas-in-development/id1866874059
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Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/What happens to a growth model built on services when AI can do some of those services itself?
Raghuram Rajan joins Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss how India's economy grew through services exports, why that model may be more resilient to AI than critics assume, and what policymakers need to get right on human capital, universities, and digital access to stay ahead.
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China became the world's largest bilateral creditor to developing countries over two decades, and for most of that time the scale of what it was doing was effectively a state secret. Its state-owned banks lent close to $1 trillion to developing-country governments, structured roughly half those loans against commodity export revenues held in offshore accounts, and concentrated the riskiest lending in countries such as Venezuela, Angola, and Russia. Net financial flows turned negative in 2019, and the countries that borrowed now repay more to China than they receive in new lending.
Sebastian Horn of the Kiel Institute tells Tim Phillips that despite the opacity and the distinctive collateral structures, we’ve seen this movie before, in the 1920s and 1980s: in the bust, serial short-term extensions of grace periods that defer payments without resolving the underlying debt, while affected countries cut spending to stay current. What Horn calls a "silent crisis" is underway in a cluster of highly indebted developing countries, too small to trigger global contagion but large enough to matter profoundly for the people living through it.
The challenge is whether China's lenders, debtor governments, and the broader international financial architecture can coordinate the kind of relief that will make a difference.
The research behind this episode:
Horn, Sebastian, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch. 2025. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." Journal of Economic Perspectives 39 (4).
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim, and Sebastian Horn. 2026. "China's Lending to Developing Countries: From Boom to Bust." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.
About Sebastian Horn
Sebastian Horn is a professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and at the University of Hamburg, where his research focuses on international finance, sovereign debt, and China's role as a global creditor.Research cited in this episode
AidData. 2021. AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, Version 3.0. AidData, William & Mary. A comprehensive public dataset tracing Chinese government-backed lending and grants to 165 countries between 2000 and 2017, built from embassy records, parliamentary gazettes, central bank reports, and news sources. Much of the quantitative evidence in the episode depends on it, since China has never published a consolidated balance sheet of its overseas lending.More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Is debt leading to the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources?: Tim Phillips speaks with Pushpam Kumar about how sovereign debt obligations shape governments' incentives to extract natural resources more intensively, and what that means for the long-run sustainability of resource-dependent developing economies.Related reading on VoxDev
Navigating Senegal's unexpected debt crisis: how a country widely regarded as a model of fiscal prudence found itself in acute debt distress, and what the episode reveals about the vulnerabilities facing developing-country borrowers in the current environment.Chinese development finance and public opinion: evidence on how Chinese-funded infrastructure projects affect attitudes towards China in recipient countries, with implications for understanding the political economy of China's overseas lending strategy.
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Between 2019 and 2023, the number of electronic transactions tripled in six Latin American economies. The share of adults using digital wallets, mobile money, and mobile bank accounts went from 3% in 2011 to 40% by 2021. A region that not long ago was defined by financial disasters, hyperinflation, and deep mistrust of banks has become one of the world's leading examples of how digital payments can transform an economy.
Diego Vera-Cossio edited Beyond Cash, The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Inter-American Development Bank's new regional microeconomic report on digital payments. He tells Tim Phillips how the effects of this revolution are more profound that freeing people from the need to carry cash. In Santiago, bus robberies fell when drivers stopped handling cash. In Brazil, firms in the most cash-intensive sectors grew substantially after the instant payment system Pix launched. In Colombia, people without any credit history started borrowing formally after being nudged to receive their social program payments digitally. And in Bolivia, where 80% of the workforce is informal, people are scanning QR codes at street market stalls.
The question Diego, his colleagues, and policymakers int he region and beyond, are now trying to answer is how to build on all of that, and how to make it stick.
The research behind this episode:
Vera-Cossio, Diego A., ed. 2025. Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Latin American and Caribbean Microeconomic Report. Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank.
To cite this episode:
Phillips, Tim and Vera-Cossio, Diego A. 2026. "Beyond Cash: The Digital Payments Revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean." VoxDev Talk (podcast).
Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.
About Diego Vera-Cossio
Diego A. Vera-Cossio is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he works on social protection, financial inclusion, digital payments, and the design of public programmes in Latin America. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.Research cited in this episode
Dominguez, Patricio. 2022. "Victim Incentives and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Bus Driver Robberies in Chile." Review of Economics and Statistics 104 (5). Exploits the reform that removed cash from Santiago buses to show that eliminating the cash target reduces robbery rates. The bus driver no longer carries anything worth taking.Vera-Cossio, Diego A., Bridget Hoffman, Camilo Pecha, and Carla Hernandez. 2024. "Does Adopting Digital Payment for Cash Transfers Improve the Financial Inclusion and Financial Well-Being of Low-Income Households?" IDB Research Insights. A randomised experiment in Colombia: unbanked beneficiaries of a social transfer programme were randomly encouraged to receive payments into digital wallets. Those who switched had fewer failed payment attempts, could check their balance without internet access via SIM, and were more likely to take out a formal loan for the first time.
Inter-American Development Bank. 2024. Fintech Ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean Exceeds 3,000 Startups. Survey counts of fintech companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Found roughly 700 fintechs in the region in 2017 and more than 3,000 by 2023, with 20% of them offering payment-related products.
More VoxDev Talks on this topic
Mobile money in Ghana: Lessons for boosting financial inclusion: Tim Phillips speaks with Francis Annan about what the Ghanaian mobile money experience reveals about reducing fraud and misconduct in rural financial systems, and what that means for how mobile money can serve the very poor.Mobile money markets and financial inclusion in Africa: Nicola Limodio discusses what happened when mobile money operators in Africa were required to make their platforms interoperable, lowering fees but also reducing rural coverage. A direct parallel to the interoperability debate in Latin America.
Related reading on VoxDev
Digital financial services go a long way: Evidence from Mexico: evidence on how expanding digital payments and digital financial services affects spending, savings, and economic outcomes in a large middle-income country.The wide-ranging benefits of fostering financial inclusion in Mexico: on how policies that bring people into the formal financial system in Mexico produce benefits that extend well beyond the financial sector itself.
VoxDevLit: Mobile Money: a curated literature review covering what research has established about mobile money, financial inclusion, and economic outcomes, useful for anyone who wants a broader picture of the evidence base behind the episode.
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