VoxDev Development Economics

Do economists treat what men do as normal human behaviour, and then study norms around women as a departure? If so, we need to pay more attention what we mean by masculinity.That's what Pauline Grosjean (University of New South Wales, CEPR) does. She argues that these masculinity norms carry economic weight of their own. What do men around the world think "being a man" means? The consistent...

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’s conversations with leading development thinkers.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgwcv4fyU28 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-global-supply-chains-are-built-and-how-to/id1866874059?i=1000774798943...

More households in low-income countries own a mobile phone than have electricity or clean water. So why is education one of the last places it has been put to work?Jenny Aker (Cornell) and Noam Angrist (Oxford) are the academic leads on a J-PAL Policy Insight that reviews 30 studies of mobile phone programmes in education. They tell Tim Phillips that the cheapest option, blasting out SMS...

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’s conversations on evidence.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756 Spotify:...

A farmer in rural Ghana can use her phone to take a picture of a blighted leaf, upload it, and within seconds she gets a diagnosis that takes account of the soil, the weather, and the other local conditions. Score one for AI. We don't have enough human experts because they are hard to train, and harder still to retain, so apps like this have huge potential. But it doesn't mean they will...

If you walk down a street in a low-income country, count the businesses you can see, you will miss many entirely. Someone who cooks at home and sells at the roadside never appears in a registry. What we know about businesses in developing countries has always been incomplete. In this week's VoxDev Talk, Marcela Eslava (Universidad de los Andes Bogota) talks to Tim Phillips about two decades of...

A river dries up. The soil turns salty. A harvest fails. Farmers across the developing world feel climate change constantly and personally, they rarely blame their government, or demand action.Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) is one of three authors of a new review of the politics of climate change in the developing world. He tells Tim Phillips that almost all of the existing research on...

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’s conversations on evidence.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EacHFVRt9p4 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/has-development-economics-lost-its-way/id1866874059?i=1000775748550 Spotify:...

How many maize seeds should farmers plant in each hole? Ask the farmers and they say two or three. Agronomists can show them more reliable seeds, where they only need one. But change the seed and everything else changes too; the fertiliser, the spacing, the whole system. This is why getting better technology into the hands of African farmers, and helping them to find ways to improve their...

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...