Ideas in Development

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 respon...

Slightly different episode today. This is a repost of a recent episode on the Africa Urban Lab's podcast, in which Kurtis Lockhart (who co-hosted our Cities series) interviews Stefan Dercon - very much an episode I wish I'd recorded! You can watch this episode on the AUL's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGamGT2Z-RM&list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHH Stefan Dercon, Professor of ...

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...

 Ethiopia is one of Africa's most ambitious bets on export-led manufacturing. It’s also the site of one of the continent's boldest recent macroeconomic reform programmes. In this episode of the Ideas in Development series on growth, Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran speak with Mamo Mihretu, the tenth Governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia and a former senior economic advisor to the prime...

The conversation about evidence-based policy usually asks why good evidence isn't shaping decisions. But we should also be asking, is the evidence base itself actually worthy of shaping policy? In this episode of Ideas in Development, Rafe Meager – Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and one of the leading meta-analysts in economics – explains why a single paper is not a p...

Development economics has built a large empirical evidence base across a range of topics and policies – but how, when and where is it being used? We often assume that evidence will have an impact, but have surprisingly few answers to these key questions. Michelle Rao, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, joins us for the first episode of our new Ideas in Development series on evidenc...

This episode might sound a little different to normal, as it was recorded live. For decades, the standard prescription for growth in developing countries was clear: industrialise. Dani Rodrik used to argue that manufacturing was the escalator that could lift workers out of low productivity, and economies out of poverty. So what happens when the escalator stops working? Dani Rodrik, Ford Found...

How can developing countries catch up with the technology frontier? The standard debate frames it as a choice between adopting technology from abroad and innovating at home. Karthik Tadepalli argues that this dichotomy is false – and that two of the twentieth century's most striking development stories show why. In this episode of Ideas in Development, Karthik takes us from Taiwan's Industrial...

What does a perfect city look like in a low- or middle-income country – and how do you get there? In the closing episode of our 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 instituti...

Are 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...

How 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 Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart on 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 complete...

Broken land markets are holding back cities across Africa. But not in Rwanda, which was able to register over 10 million land parcels, and issue over 7 million title deeds, in under five years. How did they do it, and what can other countries learn? Thierry Hoza Ngoga, one of this monumental programme's leading implementers, joins the Ideas in Development series on cities to walk through Rwand...

Africa needs to house nearly a billion new urban residents by 2050. Who's going to build it – and how will it be paid for? Kecia Rust joins the Ideas in Development series on cities to discuss the full housing delivery chain in Africa, the untapped potential of informal builders and rental markets, what micro-mortgages could unlock, and what it would actually take for African governments to go...

There is a paradox at the heart of governing cities in Africa. Mayors are responsible for building the infrastructure their fast-growing cities need. But most don't control the money that this requires. In this episode, we ask how can that change? Astrid Haas joins the Ideas in Development series on cities to discuss why African cities are so fiscally constrained, what reforms in Mexico, the P...

900 million people will be added to African cities by 2050. Getting this unprecedented urban transition right is one of the defining development challenges of our time. In this opening episode of our new Ideas in Development series on cities, Kurtis Lockhart, founder of the Africa Urban Lab, joins us to set the scene. We discuss why the link between urbanisation and prosperity is breaking down...

What actually changes when AI meets institutions, infrastructure, and the people inside them? Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa recap the Ideas in Development series on AI, drawing on conversations with Raghuram Rajan, Umar Saif, Rose Mutiso, Josh Lerner, Anton Korinek, Bruno Caprettini, Niriksha Shetty, Claire Cullen and Utkarsh Saxena. They cover the key takeaways: why the binding constraint qu...

What should a technology minister in a developing country actually focus on when it comes to AI? Umar Saif, computer scientist, former minister of Science and Technology, and IT, in Pakistan, and AI company founder, joins the Ideas in Development series on AI to discuss why data and politics, not technology, are the real bottlenecks to AI in developing countries. In this wide-ranging episode ...

What happens to a growth model built on services when AI can do some of those services itself? Raghuram Rajan joins the Ideas in Development series on AI 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.

Why is there a gap between innovation and impact? Josh Lerner joins the Ideas in Development series on AI to discuss how technology diffuses around the world, touching on the role of venture capital, universities and China. We then cover what this means for the diffusion of AI, and what can be done to speed up diffusion to developing countries.

India is already using AI to unlock its courts, classrooms and farms. In this episode of Ideas in Development, Utkarsh Saxena, Claire Cullen and Niriksha Shetty discuss how their organisations, Adalat AI, Youth Impact, and Precision Development, are deploying AI across India, and what they’ve learned during the process.

How do economists think about the economic impacts of AI today? Will our current economic paradigm still make sense if we reach AGI? In this episode of Ideas in Development, Anton Korinek joins Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa to discuss some rules of thumb that help to cut through the headlines, and speculate what the labour market impacts of AI might be if technological progress continues to ra...

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask what needs to happen before AI can take off in Africa. Rose Mutiso talks us through the current state of energy and digital infrastructure in Africa, why leapfrogging is not guaranteed with AI, and what fundamental bottlenecks need to be addressed.

How did society change during the industrial revolution? Are there lessons we can learn for the age of AI? In this episode of Ideas in Development, Deena Mousa and Oliver Hanney talk to Bruno Caprettini about one of the most common historical analogies people make when talking about AI: the industrial revolution. We discuss how British society, and the economy, changed in real time during thi...

Today on Ideas in Development, we think through why economists sound so different to technologists when discussing AI. Listen to learn about the mismatch between the public discourse on the economic impacts of AI, and how economists tend to think through periods of rapid technological change. This is the first episode of our new series on AI. Joining us as co-host across the next ten episodes...

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we explore one of the defining development stories of the last 50 years, Vietnam’s economic transformation. How did a country that endured decades of conflict, severe food shortages, and high levels of absolute poverty, turn around its fortunes so rapidly? To take us through Vietnam’s remarkable rise, we are joined by Economist and Advisor Pham Chi Lan,...

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask how Peru rapidly became a global leader in exporting high-value fruits and vegetables. To take us through this period of sectoral growth, we were joined by former Minister of Production, Piero Ghezzi, who discusses how the Peruvian government worked with the private sector to unlock bottlenecks, and the experimental industrial policy tool at the ...

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask how Costa Rica, a small country of approximately 5 million people, became an attractive hub that now hosts operations for more than 1,000 multinationals. To take us through this period of economic change, we were joined by Andres Valenciano Yamuni, who played his own role in Costa Rica’s FDI journey during his time as Minister of Foreign Trade.

In our first series of Ideas in Development, we are learning about growth success stories in Latin America, Africa and Asia, directly from the policymakers who helped to make them happen. Throughout these conversations, Oliver Hanney, VoxDev managing editor, be joined Kartik Akileswaran, co-founder of Growth Teams. In this episode we discuss why we are focusing on growth, and his experience wo...

The new VoxDev podcast, Ideas in Development, will focus on the big questions in development. In this first episode, Managing Editor Oliver Hanney discusses why we are doing so, and previews some of the upcoming series we’ve been working on, on growth, AI and cities.