Ideas in Development

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 proof, why we should learn to respect statistical noise, and why a result that holds in Kenya may or may not hold in Ghana.
We walk through Rafe’s work aggregating microcredit RCTs, and their research with Noam Angrist and Youth Impact showing that how well a programme is implemented predicts how well it works. Often, the right question for policymakers is not ‘does this work?’ but ‘can my system actually deliver this?’
We also discuss the research process in social sciences, some rules of thumb for interpreting a single causal claim, and why the public should be empowered to understand that evidence comes in different qualities.
Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
Check out Rafe’s research: https://sites.google.com/view/rachaelmeager/home

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 evidence. We discuss her own research on these questions, which looks at whether evaluations of conditional cash transfers in Latin American and Caribbean countries influenced government spending. Then we cover what we currently know about the routes from research to impact, why the political economy of evidence use has been so under-studied, and what a research agenda on evidence use should look like.
Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
Check out Michelle’s research: https://www.michellerao.com/research

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 Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, joins Ideas in Development to explain why he has become a manufacturing skeptic, what the evidence from Ethiopia, India and beyond tells us about where growth is actually coming from, and what an industrial policy fit for a services-led future should look like.
Read the full show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

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 Technology Research Institute (ITRI), which licensed chip technology in the 1970s and went on to spin out UMC and TSMC, to Brazil's Embrapa, which unlocked an area three times the size of Texas for farming and helped to turn a food-importing country into the world's largest agricultural exporter.
We discuss why human capital came before results in both stories, how the spin-off model worked at ITRI, the concept of ‘induced innovation’ that shaped Embrapa's research priorities, and why surviving the politics mattered as much as getting the science right.
Karthik's articles on Taiwan (in the Asterisk magazine) and Brazil (on his Substack) are both linked in the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

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 institutions fails, what 19th-century New York's cholera outbreaks teach Lusaka about water, why “bus good, train bad” still holds, and what the medieval European city has to offer sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing urban regions.
We also discuss the political art of being a great mayor, why "capacity eats policy as a light afternoon snack," and his three priorities for African cities over the next decade.
Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/
Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/