Win-win policies: Examples from economic research
What are some examples of win-wins in development? When do businesses and governments directly benefit from improving the welfare of others?
It’s always satisfying to include “win-win” in a title – indicating that research has shed light on some low-hanging fruit ready for policymakers or business to scoop up off the shelf and implement. In reality, policymaking is rarely that simple, but there are certainly interventions that seem to be no-brainers, across government and business.
What counts as a “win-win”?
For the purposes of this blog, to qualify as a win-win, research needs to have shown that an initiative meets two key criteria:
Benefits for implementers: The government, business, or agency implementing the policy realises concrete benefits: e.g. higher tax revenues, cost savings, greater productivity, or political goodwill.
Benefits for recipients: The people affected by the policy (citizens, consumers, workers, etc.) also experience improved welfare – such as higher incomes, better services, safer working conditions, or new opportunities – as a direct result of the intervention.
In this blog, I have highlighted some examples from VoxDev where both the implementer and the recipient end up better off.
Cleaner brick kilns lower costs and pollution
Lowering pollution need not come at the expense of business growth. In Bangladesh, traditional brick kilns are notorious polluters that are poorly managed. A recent experiment offered information, training and technical support to brick kiln owners – focusing on two key operational approaches, continuous fueling and better brick stacking. A large research team found remarkable results: substantial cost savings for kiln owners and cleaner air for surrounding communities. Social benefits outweigh costs 65 to 1, and the team plan to scale this programme across Bangladesh and other countries in South Asia.
Transparency in mobile money markets: Information is power
In Ghana’s booming mobile money market, a low-cost anti-misconduct information campaign was introduced to curb agent misconduct, which was resulting in 22% of transactions being overcharged. The programme highlighted official transaction charges and provided a number to report misconduct to consumers (vendors were also made aware). Francis Annan shows that this led to vendor misconduct falling significantly. This not only benefitted consumers, who were less likely to be overcharged, but also mobile money agents and providers. As trust in the system improved, market activity increased, and vendor’s revenue grew.
Bringing governments into the digital age
Modernising government processes can create win-wins.
Computerising customs boosts trade, reduces corruption, increases tax collection
A striking example comes from Colombia, where the government computerised customs at major ports in the early 2000s. The reform replaced slow, manual, in-person declarations with a digital platform, and also automated inspection decisions using algorithms based on risk profiles, dramatically reducing opportunities for bribery and delay. Rachid Laajaj, Marcela Eslava, and Tidiane Kinda find that trade volumes surged and firms performed better, particularly SMEs, while the government collected more revenue.
Smartcards for smarter government welfare payments
Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar partnered with the state of Andhra Pradesh to test the impacts of replacing a legacy system of government payments (for pensions, workfare wages etc.) with biometric ID cards (smartcards) and electronic payments. Their results were unambiguously positive. There was a ~40% reduction in leakage due to corruption and beneficiaries user experience improved with no reduction in access. 90-93% of beneficiaries reported preferring this new system, a remarkable political success.
Electronic tax filing
Oyebola Okunogbe and Victor Pouliquen evaluate the impact of training firms to electronically file their taxes in Tajikistan. Firms paying their taxes online see a reduction in compliance costs (filing time, in person visits to the authorities) that more than compensates the cost of training.
E-procurement for public works, India & Indonesia
As highlighted in our VoxDevLit on Land Transport Infrastructure, Lewis-Faupel et al. (2016)[1] find that switching to e-procurement reduced corruption in the procurement process and resulted in higher quality roads at the same price.
Improving conditions and incentives for workers can also benefit businesses
Improving working conditions is not just a nice thing to do, it can be a smart business decision.
A recent J-PAL Policy Insight (Workplace interventions to improve worker well-being) summarised evidence in this area and one of the academic leads, Achyuta Adhvaryu, joined our podcast to discuss the findings: Improving worker well-being: Good for workers, good for business.
I particularly like the theory of change outlined in the policy insight.
Source: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jing Cai, Michael Hou (2025), “Workplace interventions to improve worker well-being”, J-PAL Policy Insight.
So, what does this look like in practice? Jing Cai and Shing-Yi Wang show that giving employees the opportunity to provide feedback on their managers reduced worker turnover and increased team productivity. In our VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation, Rachel Heath and the team outline a range of steps businesses can take to reduce the barriers women face at work: e.g. flexible work arrangements and better reporting mechanisms.
Other evidence on VoxDev has shed light on factors that currently constrain worker productivity and welfare. Workplaces that are too hot, or too noisy, reduce productivity. You could easily imagine that certain mitigating investments by firms, such as LED lighting that emits less heat, could more than pay for themselves.
Why don’t all win-wins win?
So, why haven’t policymakers and business leaders read these articles on VoxDev and immediately implemented these policies? Even for low-hanging fruit, there are barriers to implementation.
First and foremost, evidence on examples of ‘no-brainers’ might not have reached the right decision-makers, or reached them in a way that wasn’t accessible.
Our job at VoxDev is to try to fill this gap, but even if we did reach all the relevant parties, and solved any misperceptions and uncertainty they had, they might not act on the evidence for a variety of reasons, including up-front costs, capacity constraints, political economy constraints, or political timelines.
The ‘evidence to policy’ process that governs how research translates to practice is a subject we continue to be interested in, so please do send through any interesting studies or thinking on this subject (ohanney@cepr.org). I will soon update my blog compiling the research in this area, drawing on a recent panel I hosted at CSAE on the research-policy equilibrium in Africa. And for those interested in the messy politics of sectors in different contexts, an improved understanding of which could greatly help evidence-based policy efforts, keep an eye out for the Practical Politics Platform, coming soon out of the University of Oxford.
I recently read about this other example of a win-win - eCooking for Sustainable Development: Experimental Evidence from Eastern Congo. Paddy Carter wrote a succinct summary on his blog. I am sure there are plenty I’ve missed, do reach out with interesting examples of win-wins – ohanney@cepr.org.
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