VoxDev Development Economics

Raghuram Rajan, economist, University of Chicago professor and former RBI governor, discusses India’s service-led growth and how AI might reshape it. He explores which services are vulnerable or resilient, how platforms may capture value, and policy priorities like human capital, universities, and digital access. The conversation weighs risks of concentration against opportunities for adaptation and continued growth.

Sebastian Horn, economist at the Kiel Institute and University of Hamburg who studies international finance and sovereign debt. He charts China’s $1 trillion lending boom to developing countries and its collapse after 2019. Short, sharp stories about who lent, how loans were collateralized, risky borrowers like Venezuela and Angola, and the unfolding “silent crisis” as repayments now exceed new commitments.

Diego Vera-Cossio, senior economist at the Inter-American Development Bank who edited the IDB report Beyond Cash, discusses the rapid spread of digital wallets and instant payments across Latin America. He highlights safety and convenience gains, surprising effects on crime and firm growth, how social transfers nudged formal borrowing, and the policy choices shaping interoperability and mass adoption.

Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School professor who studies venture capital and tech diffusion, discusses why innovation clusters around suppliers, universities and investors. He explores measuring diffusion via job data and what past patterns imply for AI. He also examines China’s rapid rise as a tech hub and how localized AI applications and policy levers can speed spread.

Matt Lowe, assistant professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and researcher on intergroup relations, reviews decades of research on bringing groups together. He explains how early findings were inflated by publication bias. He summarizes new pre-registered experiments showing real but much smaller effects of contact. He discusses policy implications, the role of study design, and what rigorous future tests should target.

In cities across low- and middle-income countries, traffic crawls 24 hours a day. In Dhaka during rush hour, speeds average around 15km/h. At three in the morning, when the roads are empty, they average about 20km/h. Urban transport in the developing world is not only slow because of congestion. And so congestion policy, Adam Storeygard of Tufts University argues, gets you a small fraction of the way to solving the problems of urban transport in LMICs.That counterintuitive finding is one many themes in Storeygard's wide-ranging review of what research actually tells us about how people in LMICs get from A to B. From informal minibuses to bus rapid transit, from a field experiment in Bangalore that tested congestion pricing to the long shadow of colonial railroads still shaping African trade today, the picture that emerges is more nuanced and more interesting than many policy blueprints suggest. He tells Tim Phillips what the evidence supports, where it runs out, and why fixing the roads won’t fix everything.The research behind this episode:Storeygard, Adam. 2025. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." NBER Working Paper 34354. Forthcoming in a special issue of Regional Science and Urban Economics.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim. 2026. "Transport in Low- and Middle-Income Countries." VoxDev Talk (podcast). Assign this as extra listening: the citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About Adam StoreygardAdam Storeygard is Professor of Economics at Tufts University, where his research focuses on urbanisation, transportation, and the economic geography of the developing world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his work uses geographic and satellite data to study how infrastructure shapes where people live, how they move, and how economies develop.Research cited in this episodeAkbar, Prottoy Aman, Victor Couture, Gilles Duranton, and Adam Storeygard. 2023. "The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich and Poor Countries." NBER Working Paper 31642. The paper behind the Dhaka finding: assembling travel speed data across 1,200 cities in 152 countries, the authors show that cities in poor countries are roughly half as fast as those in rich countries, and that most of the gap is not congestion but structural low speeds in the absence of traffic.Björkegren, Daniel, Alice Duhaut, Geetika Nagpal, and Nick Tsivanidis. 2025. "Public and Private Transit: Evidence from Lagos." Working paper. When Lagos introduced a major new public bus system, informal drivers on affected routes left,  so bus frequency on those routes fell on net. The big benefit accrued to other routes that informal drivers switched to, where prices and waiting times fell. Winners and losers, not a clean gain.Franklin, Simon. 2018. "Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies." Economic Journal 128 (614). A randomised trial in Addis Ababa: providing transport subsidies to unemployed young people helped them search for and find formal jobs. Effects did not persist once subsidies ended, raising questions about how much the transport constraint itself was the binding one.Borker, Girija. 2021. "Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women." World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9731. Women in Delhi attend less selective colleges than male peers with identical academic credentials, not because they are not admitted, but because of perceived harassment risk during the commute. Delhi university students overwhelmingly live with their parents, and the daily journey matters as much as the institution.Kreindler, Gabriel. 2024. "Peak-Hour Road Congestion Pricing: Experimental Evidence and Equilibrium Implications." Econometrica 92 (4). A field experiment in Bangalore, paying drivers to avoid congested areas and times. The finding: congestion pricing would produce only modest benefits in Bangalore because traffic density has a relatively moderate impact on speed there, meaning you would have to charge astronomically high prices to shift behaviour significantly.Jedwab, Remi, and Adam Storeygard. 2022. "The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa 1960–2010." Journal of the European Economic Association 20 (1). Shows how transportation infrastructure investments, including the legacy of colonial railroads built primarily to connect mines to ports, continue to shape where Africans live and how countries trade, with consequences that push African economies toward overseas rather than intra-regional commerce.More VoxDev Talks on this topicMichelson, Hope, 2026, “African agriculture's underappreciated supply side.” VoxDev Talk. How transport links are one of the many impediments that stop rural farmers from making the most of the opportunities of better agricultural inputs.Related reading on VoxDev"Urban transport infrastructure in developing countries”, the VoxDevLit review of research on urban transport in LMICs, covering buses, BRT, subways, and informal transit networks."Who wins when public transit challenges private transit?”, the Lagos bus reform discussed in this episode, with further detail on how informal drivers responded to new public routes."Perceived risk of street harassment and college choice of women in Delhi”, Girija Borker's research on how commute safety shapes women's educational choices, as discussed by Storeygard in this episode."The equitable benefits of Colombia's bus rapid transit system”, complements the discussion of BRT in Bogota, one of Storeygard's three best-evidenced cases for BRT benefits.

Michael Greenstone, economist and director of EPIC who measures the health costs of air pollution. He discusses particulate pollution’s huge toll and why regulation often fails. He explains a randomized market test in Surat where tradable permits cut pollution, raised compliance, and lowered costs. He outlines enforcement, monitoring needs, and how this approach might scale in India and beyond.

A small number of Asian countries have provided thousands of high-skilled migrants to the US, many of whom have gone on to great success. What created this long-term trend, and what has it contributed to the US economy? And with changes in domestic policy, technology, and the opportunities in other countries, will it continue? Gaurav Khanna of UC San Diego tells Tim Phillips the story of high-skilled migration to the US and warns of the consequences for the US economy if, in the future, they decide to go elsewhere – or stay at home.

Giovanni Peri, UC Davis economist on migration and labour markets, and Dany Bahar, Brown economist on migration and development, discuss rising refugee flows and why they are becoming structural. They cover myths about where refugees go, harms of work bans, the payoff from better employer matching, cost-effective language training, placement and mobility constraints, who should deliver services, and key evidence gaps.

Rose Mutiso, founder of the Africa Tech Futures Lab and former research director at the Energy Growth Hub, discusses AI and development in Africa. She outlines power, connectivity and data as core prerequisites. She explains the role of data centers, cloud access challenges, and how targeted public policy and shared infrastructure can lower barriers for local tech.