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Ideas in Development: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Ideas in Development
Conversations on the forces shaping economic development.
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- Oct 6, 202646 min
S4 Ep7: Does Africa need development economics?
If every development economist stopped their research tomorrow, would Africa's growth rate in 2040 look any different?Ken Opalo, associate professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and author of the Substack An Africanist Perspective, joins Oliver Hanney to argue that the constraint on African growth is not knowing what to do but knowing how to get it done. He also explains why Kenya's evidence boom has coincided with declining policymaking, and what happens when policymakers outsource their ambitions.In this wide-ranging conversation we cover: Why the SDGs are the wrong goal for an ambitious minister. How narrow evidence reshaped education policy in Tanzania and Kenya. The craft of policymaking. When a policymaker should actually listen to a development economist. How to learn the right lessons from growth success stories. What the third wave of philanthropy should fund. Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
- Sep 22, 202655 min
S4 Ep6: GiveDirectly’s quest for scale
GiveDirectly started out as a small nimble team founded by PhD economists, who had a novel approach to ending poverty – just give cash. But they are no longer the new kids on the block, and have been scaling their operations rapidly in recent years, a trend that could intensify if the third wave of American philanthropy materialises.That’s a huge opportunity, but the potential of operating across entire countries is a radically different proposition. So what does an evidence-driven organisation research when it's trying to go from moving millions a year to billions?Caitlin Tulloch, Senior Director for Research, Learning and Product at GiveDirectly, joins Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on cash transfers at scale. We cover running a research portfolio like the treasury, the macro forecasting work around a new Malawi project, the trade-off between fraud and reach, building a global emergency response capability, and the politics of putting a lot of cash into someone else's economy.Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
- Sep 8, 202649 min
S4 Ep5: How BRAC partners with governments to fight poverty
The ultra-poor graduation approach has one of the strongest evidence bases in development. Almost all of that evidence comes from NGO delivery – but true scale typically requires government delivery.Stephanie Brockerhoff, Director for Programme Design and Impact at BRAC's Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, joins Oliver Hanney to explain why anti-poverty pilots often fall apart at handover, how BRAC partners with governments, and the bottlenecks to scale that remain.Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
- Aug 18, 202630 min
How to start an export boom
This interview was conducted by Exporters Without Borders (ESF), which incubates entrepreneurs to start new export industries in low and middle income countries. The video version of this podcast, an accompanying article, and their ongoing research are at exporterswithoutborders.comThomas Kehler started his career teaching at a New England prep school, before he landed in Uganda, where he started guiding fishing tours of Lake Albert. Here he came to know a young Joseph Nye – later a key architect of US foreign policy – who got Thomas thinking about development economics, and how to have impact with his career.In the decades to follow, Thomas would go on to start two export industries from close to nothing. Between them, Colombian cut flowers and Chilean farmed salmon are now worth ~$9 billion a year and employ over 300,000 people. On a combination of willpower and luck, he managed to solve one of the biggest open questions in development economics – how countries enter new industries, and capture the jobs that come with them – twice.Read more on Substack: https://exporterswithoutborders.substack.com/p/how-to-start-an-export-boom
- Jul 7, 202652 min
S4 Ep4: Has development economics lost its way?
What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions?Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics.In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem.Read the full show notes on the Ideas in Development Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
- Jun 30, 20261h 3m
How global supply chains are built – and how to actually attract investment
Bill McRaith spent his career building supply chains – from 1980s Britain, to a factory in Panyu, China in 1990, to Ethiopia three decades later. He joins Oliver Hanney to explain what really attracts manufacturing investment to a developing economy, and why the model most countries are targeting no longer exists.In this wide-ranging conversation we cover why China’s industry grew; why responsive local governments beat tax holidays; the collapse of the wage gap; how Ethiopia was chosen as a beachhead; and why apparel remains the right first-mover industry for countries not yet on the industrialisation road.Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
- Jun 23, 20261h 25m
Stefan Dercon on elite bargains and kickstarting economic growth (via the AUL Podcast)
Slightly different episode today. This is a repost of a recent episode on the Africa Urban Lab's podcast, in which Kurtis Lockhart (who co-hosted our Cities series) interviews Stefan Dercon - very much an episode I wish I'd recorded!You can watch this episode on the AUL's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGamGT2Z-RM&list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHHStefan Dercon, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and former Chief Economist at the UK’s Department for International Development (now FCDO), joins Kurtis Lockhart to discuss what it takes for cities and countries to kickstart economic growth, exploring in particular Stefan’s recent work operationalizing elite bargains in the real world. It’s a grounded conversation on why growth and development depend not only on planning and policy, but on the politics that make growth possible.All AUL Podcast episodes available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHHWe will resume our usual schedule next week!
- Jun 16, 202650 min
S4 Ep3: Moving billions towards evidence
In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
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