Ideas in Development

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-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHHStefan Dercon, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and former Chief Economist at the UK’s Department for International Development (now FCDO), joins Kurtis Lockhart to discuss what it takes for cities and countries to kickstart economic growth, exploring in particular Stefan’s recent work operationalizing elite bargains in the real world. It’s a grounded conversation on why growth and development depend not only on planning and policy, but on the politics that make growth possible.All AUL Podcast episodes available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHHWe will resume our usual schedule next week!

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 minister. Having viewed Ethiopia’s economic change through various lenses, Mamo explains why Ethiopia's industrial parks succeeded where others stalled, what it took to attract anchor investors, and how the central bank prepared, sequenced and executed reform under acute economic pressure.Our conversation ranges across the limits of debt-financed, public-investment-led growth; the institutions behind the industrial-parks programme; why the most credible, not the cheapest, wins investment; the macroeconomic foundations for a thriving economy; and the lessons for any government embarking on an ambitious growth agenda – diagnostics, sequencing, communication, and ownership.Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

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

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/

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, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/

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 Rwanda's land reform journey, from consultation to rollout, and discuss why dysfunctional land markets may be the single biggest bottleneck to urban growth in Africa.Read the shownotes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/

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 Philippines, and Freetown can teach us, and what national and city governments should prioritise to raise revenue and unlock finance.Note: The following question was accidentally cut at 16:41 “Thankfully, there are countries we can look to that found themselves in a similar spot, and managed to find their way out with effective reforms, such as Mexico which stabilised and leveraged fiscal transfers. What did Mexico do that mattered?” Read the shownotes on our Substack: Ideas in Development | Oliver Hanney | SubstackCheck out the Africa Urban Lab: Home

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 question matters more than the model question; what the data desert problem means for national AI strategies; why access and value capture are not the same thing; and what AI is doing to the growth escalators lower-income countries depend on. And conclude with the most important questions this series did not resolve.

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.

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.

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.

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 is Deena Mousa.

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 heart of that story: Mesas Ejecutivas.