VoxDev Development Economics

King Leopold II of Belgium told his envoy in London that he did not want to lose his slice of "this magnificent African cake". The cake was the Congo Free State. Today the Democratic Republic of Congo holds 70% of the...

Medicine has run rigorous clinical trials since the 1940s. Development economists borrowed the structure of the trials during the credibility revolution. Chris Cotton (Queen's University) argues that they misunderstood...

How can we cut corruption in government, procurement that generates kickbacks for local politicians? We could hire officials on merit. Across the developing world, many governments now do exactly that. So why do public...

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...

Research on how to collect more tax in developing countries has focused on how information, especially administrative data, can help. But in Uganda for example, buyers and sellers report different amounts for the same...

Many conversations about development for focus on aid: how much, from whom, and for how long. But aid has never been more than a small part of what pays for a country's development, and in 2025 it fell by 23.1%. The...

By 2018 the reservoirs supplying Cape Town were down to 20% of capacity. If they reached 13.5%, the city would need to shut down parts of the water network and send residents to collection points to fetch water. That...

In 1978, a farmer in rural China could not sell a sack of grain above the state quota, choose an employer, or move to the nearest city without a permit. In this week's VoxDev Talk, Kaiji Chen and Tao Zha (both Emory...

The ballot cast by a landless labourer counts the same as the one cast by the landlord whose fields he works. In this way, democracy can give excluded or subordinate groups access to political power. That's not what has...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...