VoxDev Development Economics

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About the show

Latest episodes

• Ideas in Development: GiveDirectly's journey to scale

  October 9, 2026 · 55 min

  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.yout…

• Evidence-based policy: Why one good trial isn't enough

  October 7, 2026 · 34 min

  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 an important part of…

• Follow the paper trail

  October 1, 2026 · 21 min

  In Uganda, every sale between two VAT-registered firms reaches the tax authority twice. The seller reports it, and so does the buyer. But the two numbers rarely match. In Turkiye, a supplier that installs its first industrial robot doesn’t…

• How politicians co-opt bureaucrats

  September 29, 2026 · 27 min

  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 contracts still go…

• Ideas in Development: How BRAC partners with governments to fight poverty

  September 25, 2026 · 50 min

  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.yout…

• No Taxation without Administration

  September 23, 2026 · 40 min

  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 VAT transaction in…

• Rethinking development cooperation: The case for a 'balance sheet' approach

  September 16, 2026 · 42 min

  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 need to rethink our…

• Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a city's water resilience

  September 9, 2026 · 38 min

  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 was known as Day Zero…