Safety nets, growth, scaling programmes and more!
This week in development economics at VoxDev: 22/05/2026
This week on Ideas in Development:
In our live episode, Dani Rodrik joined Oliver Hanney to discuss why he changed his mind on manufacturing. Watch here.
On Tuesday, Karthik Tadepalli explained why adopt versus innovate is a false dichotomy, how Taiwan and Brazil did both, and why R&D should be a central part of the development playbook.
And in this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Nancy Birdsall revisits the World Bank’s East Asian Miracle report, discussing its origins, its careful navigation of ideological constraints, and what its findings might still offer policymakers today.
In Indonesia, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken, Sudarno Sumarto, Achmad Maulana, Vivi Alatas, and Elan Satriawan study Kartu Prakerja, an on-demand cash and training assistance programme. While the programme led to increases in self-employment and income among those who genuinely received it, the programme’s flexible online design also enabled third-party ‘jockey’ agents to intercept benefits. This highlights a key trade-off between accessibility and verification in safety net design.
Efraim Benmelech and Joao Monteiro provide the first large-scale, cross-country evidence on the macroeconomic consequences of war for the belligerents, using a dataset covering 115 conflicts and 145 countries over the past 75 years, including both interstate wars (state vs. state) and intrastate wars (state vs. non-state). On average, they find that real GDP falls by about 12% over 10 years for treated countries relative to control countries, corresponding to an absolute loss of more than $28 billion.
Scaling evidence-based education programmes requires identifying the non-negotiable components that drive impact and adapting everything else to fit within government systems. Sustainable gains depend on embedding the underlying principles into policy and institutional practice – not just replicating programme features. Charul Dhingra and Parikrama Chowdhry explain.
Erik Katovich and Fanny Moffette provide evidence on agricultural patronage, a form of political favouritism that may prevail in rural contexts where agricultural favours are particularly valuable. Municipalities where landholder-financed mayors win close elections see broad changes in governance and land use. Agricultural promotion spending, rural credit, soy cultivation, and environmental violations all increase with the share of campaign donations coming from landholders.
Following a four-year study of smallholder farmers in Malawi, Kate Ambler, Alan de Brauw, and Susan Godlonton find that combining cash transfers with intensive agricultural extension produces larger and more durable gains in crop production and household consumption than either intervention alone.
Digital financial services can meaningfully support women’s economic empowerment across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but only when products are designed around how women already manage money – with features that enable earmarking, smooth liquidity, and account for household dynamics. Tasnuba Sinha discusses.
In a field experiment in Nairobi’s informal settlements, Laurens Cherchye, Pierre-André Chiappori, Bram De Rock, Charlotte Ringdal, and Frederic Vermeulen found that parents usually made child-nutrition decisions cooperatively, and that fathers were at least as willing as mothers to allocate resources to their children’s meals – challenging the case for universally targeting mothers in cash transfer programmes.
Elsewhere in development:
In Development is a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress happens in the developing world, and they are hiring their first Managing Editor!
How big is India’s formal sector? Abhishek Waghmare explores on Data for India.
Health insurance in developing countries. Nalini Gulati, Vikas Dimble and Harshita Sharma summarise what we know.
Mohammad Altaf Afridi reflects on the failures of aid efforts in Pakistan.